AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Robot Rescue

This year’s Robot Rescue event was held in conjunction with the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and RoboCup at the colocated RoboCup and International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The year 2001 was the first year that the rescue event was part of RoboCup, and the second year that the event was held as part of the AAAI Robot Competition. The joint rules committee from RoboCup and AAAI brought two communities together to develop the rules and scoring method. There were four registered teams in the competition: (1) Sharif University, (2) Swarthmore College, (3) Utah State University, and (4) the University of Edinburgh. Additionally, several teams exhibited their robots in the rescue arena, including the University of South Florida and the University of Minnesota. This article discusses the 2001 Robot Rescue event: the course, the rules, the research approaches of the participants, and the final scores.