Scarecrow: If I only had AI

At the 1992 AAAI robot contest one of the top finishers was Scarecrow – a robot that had no computer in the traditional sense, was built out of less than $200 of parts, and was explained and operated by a five year old. The designers sought to demonstrate the capabilities and competence that can be accomplished by using a strictly reactive architecture for well defined tasks such as that contest. This paper reexamines the Scarecrow robot and puts it into historical context. With fifteen years of perspective, we can also see what Scarecrow has to say about the perception of intelligence. 1 Finding the Tall Poles in a Problem Space In 1992 AAAI held the first of its annual robotics contests. The contest that year was to find, and then visit in order, a set of tall poles in a physical problem space. A set of ten 10’ tall 4” diameter pieces of PVC were placed vertically inside of a 40’ diameter arena. Inside the arena were cardboard box obstacles, approximately 1 × 2 × 3 foot set on their 1 × 3 side. Approximately fifty boxes were in the arena. The challenge to the robots in round one was to visit each of the poles and ID each pole (or create a unique ID for that pole). In round two robots were required to visit, in order, a set of three poles (selected by the judges) that the robot had previously identified. Teams were allowed to place identifying markers (e.g., bar codes) on the poles in advance. A robot was judged to have visited a pole if it correctly identified a pole while simultaneously coming within two robot diameters of that pole. A robot successfully avoided an obstacle if it turned away from an obstacle rather than attempting to plow through it. ∗with apologies to Mssrs. Harburg & Arlen: I could suck up amps of power; Computing for many hours; Making models verify; And my inferences would be seizing; While my memory was GC’ing; If I only had AI †School of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK. [email protected] ‡Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT §KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, Norman OK