Saturday, September 27, 2008 – Sunday, April 26, 2009

Robots + Us is a place where humans meet machines. You’ll marvel at the science that creates some of our best (artificial) friends and workers. Find out how robots help us, change us, and teach us about ourselves.

It’s Humans vs. Machine in this contest of precision and speed, Can you solve the puzzle before the Robot Arm?

Mobots are robots on a roll. Visitors can guide light-seeking robots through a maze. Watch them avoid obstacles as they turn on a dime.

Make your own Jitterbug. Visitors assemble delightful mechanical creatures from simple materials while exploring how physics and mechanics shape behavior.

Create Crawling Creatures in the Leg Lab. This activity station offers opportunities to explore the dynamics of walking machines. Visitors can experiment with different leg configurations and test them on different obstacle courses and a tabletop treadmill.

Welcome to the Garden of Sensory Delights. Visitors can use their own bodies and a variety of tethered output devices to trigger a profusion of wacky kinetic devices to create a colorful garden of light, sound and movement.

Who’s that girl? These visitors try to trick a face recognition machine by putting on disguises.

An ant colony in an exhibit about robots? Observe a living colony of ants that solves mazes in the course of finding its food. Simple creatures create a mastermind when they work together.

Somebody’s watching you! Jeremiah, a computer generated avatar, “lives” only inside the machine. Or does it? Jeremiah responds through facial expressions to the motions of visitors who walk in its path.

Get personal with Larry the Robot and his friends. Questions of human and machine identity come to the foreground in a fanciful cafe inhabited by digital avatars as well as exhibit visitors. After meeting these characters you may no longer be able to tell if you’re talking to a human or machine.