It looks like an oversized vacuum cleaner, but can call on enormous amounts of information. It has wheels, a keyboard and monitor, and can navigate itself around a room of objects, many of them precious. Welcome to your latest tour guide, a 1.5-metre tall robot that from next month will greet visitors, in Italian, to the Agrigento archaeological museum in Sicily and then take them around it. Cicerobot can plan tours and respond to a visitor's wishes. Harris Dindo, part of the science team at Palermo University that developed the robot, said: "It uses the technique of latent semantic analysis, which means it can answer many of the questions tourists throw at it and have intelligent interaction with them." Cicerobot has been tested in the museum, which displays priceless objects dating from the 6th century BC, over the past year and will go fully into action next month, when the tourist season starts. "Its sensors allow it to guide tourists around the museum, avoiding obstacles, but the director of the museum was naturally quite concerned at first because the environment is very delicate and there are many display cases full of fragile things," Dr Dindo said. "We had to get the navigation right." The scientist said the robot, which only speaks in Italian at the moment but will be programmed to speak in English and other languages, had become popular with visitors: "It is an attraction in itself." Although robot guides may never completely replace human ones, Dr Dindo said he thought some museums would use robots one day: "It never gets tired or bored, its always enthusiastic and it can store a lot more information than a human guide." Asked if he thought robots might lead visitors around the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he replied: "Why not?"