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Pittsburgh’s A-Beep About Roboworld

June 10, 2009

A place like the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, would usually be off of our interest radar screen. Not any more — now that it’s the home of the new Roboworld, “the world’s largest permanent robotics exhibit.”

Note the word “robotics” instead of “robot.”

There are no clanking metal butlers serving cocktails, no battle-scarred Robot Wars veterans duking it out in death matches for our petty amusement.

Instead, visitor engagement at Roboworld will be more high-minded, from contributing to future robot morality through the “Robot Ethics Kiosk,” to programming a mundane hallway route for a hospital Service Bot (Note to readers: guess which one of those tasks will most likely be your future job). Foolish humans will be given the chance to play Foosball or shoot hoops against modified industrial robots, although Roboworld expects that the people will lose.

Roboworld works in your pop culture robot favorites in its Robot Hall of Fame, whose inductees range from the vacuuming Roomba to the murdering T-800 Terminator. “Museum quality” life-size replicas of some of the enshrined are on display, including R2D2 and C-3PO, Robby the Robot and Gort, Maria from Metropolis and B-9 from Lost in Space.

An article on Roboworld in the Philadelphia Inquirer notes that Pennsylvania has more than 60 robotics firms — although we don’t think that it had a bearing on the Toy Robot Museum’s decision to locate there.

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