The AAAI-2002 Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition

It is not unusual for the registration area at an academic conference to include several desks. Usually those attendees with names beginning A–L are encouraged to line up behind one desk, and M–Z line up behind another. However, the 2002 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence included another desk: Robots! Some robots at the 2002 American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition actually registered for the conference on their own. The AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition is held each year in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This summer marked the eleventh annual competition and exhibition, making it the oldest AI-centric mobile robot competition. The event included three competitions and a mobile robot exhibition. The competitive events included the Robot Challenge, in which robots are to emulate a human attending the conference; Robot Rescue, in which robots find simulated disaster victims in a damaged building; and Robot Host, in which robots serve food to human guests and act as mobile information kiosks. Over the last decade, the competitions and exhibitions have witnessed numerous AI robotics firsts, including the first demonstration of robotic soccer (Sahota 1994), the first multirobot competition teams (Balch et al. 1995), and early practical demonstrations of important vision and localization algorithms (Buhmann et al. 1995; Dudek 1998). This year marked another group of firsts: For the first time robots attempted the entire “Grand Challenge,” where a robot emulates a person attending and speaking at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.1 This year was also the first time a team scored well enough to place in the rigorously judged Robot Rescue event as well as the first time a team from outside North America took first place in any of the events (YSC, an Iranian team, took top honors in the Rescue event). The results of the competitions are given in figure 1, and group photographs of all the robots at the event are shown in figures 2 and 3. In 2002, the event was organized by Holly Yanco of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Tucker Balch of the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Robot Challenge was organized by Ben Kuipers of the University of Texas at Austin and Ashley Stroupe of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The Robot Exhibition was run by Ian Horswill and Christopher Dac Le, both of Northwestern University. Robot Host was cochaired by David Gustafson of Kansas State University and Francois Michaud of Universite de Sherbrooke. Robot Rescue was run by Jenn Casper, Mark Micire, and Robin Murphy, all of the University of South Florida.