Designing the 1993 Robot Competition

an excellent article on this competition; a companion article describes two of the top finishers (Congdon et al. 1993). The second competition attracted even more competitors, and the sophistication of the hardware and software systems seemed to have grown geometrically. An article by Ilah Nourbakhsh (Nourbakhsh et al. 1993) describes some of the top teams from the competition, the strategies they used, and their results. As co-chairmen of the 1993 robotics competition, Terry Weymouth and I had the challenging and often chaotic job of designing the rules, coordinating the setup and administration of the contest, and trying to cope with the needs of the 15 teams that put so much energy into their entries. This article reports some of the experiences I had in helping to design and run the contest and some reflections, drawn from post mortem abstracts written by the competitors, on the relation of the contest to current research efforts in mobile robotics. Most of the teams (see side bar) arrived at the cavernous exhibition hall by Sunday night. There was plenty of space for the robots and associated paraphernalia, and it looked like a true robot-builders convention, with computers and robot hardware in various stages of completion. As in the first contest, many of the teams were debugging hardware and coding major sections for the contest. Camaraderie and coopera■ The Second Annual Robotics Competition and Exhibition was held in July 1993 in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article reports some of my experiences in helping to design and run the contest and some reflections, drawn from post mortem abstracts written by the competitors, on the relation of the contest to current research efforts in mobile robotics.