Visitors to the Anchorage Museum on Friday morning did double-takes as a robotic tour guide greeted them, rolled through the galleries like R2-D2, looked over the exhibits, made conversation and sometimes asked for help.
"Second floor, please," it requested of an elevator rider. "I can't push the buttons."
The telepresence robot made by Beam+ is 1 foot wide, about 4 1/2 feet tall, weighs 40 pounds and has enough power to roll up a standard wheelchair ramp. It looks like a riderless Segway or a push vacuum cleaner with a computer screen on top. Such machines have been around for a few years, mainly in industrial applications, but are still new to most members of the public.
People seemed genuinely startled at how it wandered around on its own and chatted with people, including a busload of second-graders from Goose Bay Elementary School.
"Hi!" "Oh my!" "This is cool!" "Why is your head stuck in a computer?"
The head on the screen belonged to Lindsay Garrod, the museum's director of programs. She guided the machine through the building from a seat in the atrium, clicking the arrow buttons on a MacBook. The main image on her laptop showed what the robot was looking at ahead. A small insert showed the floor immediately in front of it.
"I feel pretty comfortable interacting," she said. "People are so surprised when they see it that it makes it fun to communicate."
The machine lists on the Internet at about $2,000. This one was ordered from Amazon, said Doug Adams, the museum's chief digital officer. It had just arrived when it took its maiden voyage on Friday morning.
Garrod kept it at a slow walk as she learned how to work the controls for the first time. "I can't quite judge distances yet," she said as she stopped the device 6 feet short of a door. But within a half-hour she'd become sufficiently adept to move at a faster clip and smoothly maneuver through crowded places.
It appeared to be easy to master. Garrod handed the laptop over to artist Michael Conti, who was setting up his solo show at the museum. At first he struggled to extract the machine from a tight spot in some back offices, but in less than five minutes he had it down and was guiding it toward the coffee kiosk.
Even members of the staff who knew the gizmo had been ordered seemed surprised and amused as it rolled up to them. "It's a rare day in technology when people are still amazed by something new," Adams said.
The second-graders were perhaps more blasé about it than the adults. "They're used to thinking about this stuff," he said. "There's not so much of a wow factor if you're under 10."
How will the museum use it? Garrod and Adams suggested a number of applications. It could show collections to curators or scholars in other cities or conduct self-guided tours from distant locations. The robot could help someone lead a group through the museum in a foreign language.
"You can operate it from anywhere in the world," Adams said. "Connect a cellphone to it and you can take it down the sidewalk."
Inside the museum, however, there were some places where the screen froze and the wheels stopped rolling. "There are a few dead spots," Adams said, notably where the original building connects with later additions. "It wasn't an issue when you were using laptops, but now we may have to rethink our whole Wi-Fi strategy."
"I'm down to 20 minutes and showing a red battery level," Garrod said. Adams chaperoned the machine to the automatic doors between galleries, which the machine activated with a light push. Then it was back to his cluttered office, where Garrod negotiated a tight squeeze between chairs and boxes. She hit "P," activating the command for it to self-dock in the recharging station. It had run for about two hours.
Right now the device is known by the identifier given by the manufacturer, Anchorage Museum Zero One. That won't be the permanent name, Adams said.
"We're going to have a naming contest," he said.