The AAAI-2001 Robot Exhibition

The 2001 American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Exhibition provided a forum for robots to operate outside a competitive arena. With a wide variety in behavior and form, the robots in the exhibition created a sense of the broad range of function in the robotic community. As one of the only events with no scoring or judges, the exhibition takes on a very different feel and allows robots with different objectives to be shown and discussed. The exhibition has provided past AI researchers with new perspectives and ideas. Exhibitors have also benefited through hands-on exposure to real robots from other institutions. The extreme diversity, however, presents numerous challenges. At the most basic level, finding the proper way to interact with an audience presents a challenge. Although most visitors are able to quickly and easily understand competitive robots and their tasks, the exhibited robots have no such context to quickly identify their work. The robots are often out of their natural environments, which can further obscure the purpose of a particular project. Finally, with no implicit timing or natural cycle, the exhibition takes on a completely amorphous quality that, in contrast to the natural scheduling of a competition, creates difficulty in finding or holding audiences. This year’s exhibitors were able to overcome many of these obstacles, though, and generate conversation about several important AI topics. Each of the following projects was presented at the exhibition as well as discussed in a more detailed talk on the final day of the workshop.