The Minerva Project Minerva is an autonomous robot that moves daily through crowds at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. This web site allows you to remotely send Minerva through the museum and watch her operations. Minerva is a talking robot designed to accommodate people in public spaces. Minerva actively approaches people, offers tours, and then leads them from exhibit to exhibit. The face is a rich source of information about human behavior.
Facial displays indicate emotion, pain, brain function and pathology, and regulate social behavior.
Manual methods of coding facial behavior are labor intensive, semi-quantitative, and difficult to standardize across laboratories or over time. In daily life, prototypic expressions occur relatively infrequently, and emotion more often is communicated by change in one or two discrete features, such as tightening the lips in anger. To capture the subtlety of human emotion and non-verbal communication, our interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and psychologists developed the first version of Automated Face Analysis. Robotic Maintenance in Space Future space facilities that could power our planet and expand our horizons will differ vastly from the satellites and space stations familiar today. Characterized by their immense size and the difficulties of human construction in orbit, future space facilities will be assembled in part by robots.