Information Technology
AAAI-98 Presidential Address: The Importance of Importance
Human intelligence is shaped by what is most important to us -- the things that cause ecstasy, despair, pleasure, pain, and other intense emotions. The ability to separate the important from the unimportant underlies such faculties as attention, focusing, situation and outcome assessment, priority setting, judgment, taste, goal selection, credit assignment, the selection of relevant memories and precedents, and learning from experience. AI has for the most part focused on logic and reasoning in artificial situations where only relevant variables and operators are specified and has paid insufficient attention to processes of reducing the richness and disorganization of the real world to a form where logical reasoning can be applied. This article discusses the role of importance judgment in intelligence; provides some examples of research that make use of importance judgments; and offers suggestions for new mechanisms, architectures, applications, and research directions for AI.
The 1997 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition
In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the event.
The 1997 AAAI Mobile Robot Exhibition
A wide variety of robotics research was demonstrated at the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition. Twenty-one robotic teams participated, making it the largest exhibition ever. This article describes the robotics research presented by the participating teams.
The Find-Life-on-Mars Event
The Find-Life-on-Mars event of the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition featured robots trying to find and collect stationary and moving colored objects in an arena littered with real rocks. The 2- day event had 11 entries participating in both single- robot and multirobot categories, both with and without manipulators. During the event, many of the robots successfully demonstrated object recognition, obstacle avoidance, exploration, and the collection and depositing of objects.
TRACKIES: RoboCup-97 Middle-Size League World Cochampion
Asada, Minoru, Suzuki, Sho'ji, Takahashi, Yasutake, Uchibe, Eiji, Nakamura, Masateru, Mishima, Chizuko, Ishizuka, Hiroshi, Kato, Tatsunori
This article describes a milestone in our research efforts toward the real robot competition in RoboCup. We participated in the middle-size league at RoboCup-97, held in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan. The most significant features of our team, TRACKIES, are the application of a reinforcement learning method enhanced for real robot applications and the use of an omnidirectional vision system for our goalie that can capture a 360-degree view at any instant in time. The method and the system used are shown with competition results.