This article is the content of an invited talk given by the authors at the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96). The piece begins with a short history of the competition, then discusses the technical challenges and the political and cultural issues associated with bringing it off every year. We also cover the science and engineering involved with the robot tasks and the educational and commercial aspects of the competition. We finish with a discussion of the community formed by the organizers, participants, and the conference attendees.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is being challenged to perform more frequent and intensive space-exploration missions at greatly reduced cost. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than among robotic planetary exploration missions that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) conducts for NASA. This article describes recent and ongoing work on spacecraft autonomy and ground systems that builds on a legacy of existing success at JPL applying AI techniques to challenging computational problems in planning and scheduling, real-time monitoring and control, scientific data analysis, and design automation.

This article discusses the use of fast (60 frames per second) object tracking using the COGNACHROME VISION SYSTEM, produced by Newton Research Labs. The authors embedded the vision system in a small robot base to tie for first place in the Clean Up the Tennis Court event at the 1996 Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Of particular interest is that the authors' entry was the only robot capable of using a gripper to capture and pick up the motorized, randomly moving squiggle ball. Other examples of robotic systems using fast vision tracking are also presented, such as a robot arm capable of catching thrown objects and the soccer-playing robot team that won the 1996 Micro Robot World Cup Soccer Tournament in Taejon, Korea.

The Robot World-Cup Soccer (RoboCup) is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where a wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined. A robot team must actually perform a soccer game, incorporating various technologies, including design principles of autonomous agents, multiagent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, robotics, and sensor fusion. RoboCup is a task for a team of multiple fast-moving robots under a dynamic environment. Although RoboCup's final target is a world cup with real robots, RoboCup offers a software platform for research on the software aspects of RoboCup.

The Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems (AIPS-96) was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, from 29 to 31 May 1996. The main gathering of researchers in AI and planning and scheduling, the conference promoted the practical applications of planning technologies. Details of the conference papers and sessions are provided as well as information on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) held its 1996 Fall Symposia Series on 9 to 11 November in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This article contains summaries of the seven symposia that were conducted: (1) Configuration; (2) Developing Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities; (3) Embodied Cognition and Action; (4) Flexible Computation: Results, Issues, and Opportunities; (5) Knowledge Representation Systems Based on Natural Language; (6) Learning Complex Behaviors in Adaptive Intelligent Systems; and (7) Plan Execution: Problems and Issues.

The YODA Robot Project at the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute consists of a group of young researchers who share a passion for autonomous systems that can bootstrap its knowledge from real environments by exploration, experimentation, learning, and discovery. Our participation in the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, held as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, served as the first milestone in advancing us toward this goal. YODA's software architecture is a hierarchy of abstraction layers, ranging from a set of behaviors at the bottom layer to a dynamic, mission-oriented planner at the top. This abstraction architecture has proven robust in dynamic and noisy environments, as shown by YODA's performance at the robot competition.

The Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Portland, Oregon, in conjunction with the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The first event stressed navigation and planning. In addition to the competition, there was a mobile robot exhibition in which teams demonstrated robot behaviors that did not fit into the competition tasks. The robot competition raised the standard for autonomous mobile robotics, demonstrating the intelligent integration of perception, deliberation, and action.

Indoor mobile robots are becoming reliable enough in navigation tasks to consider working with teams of robots. Using SRI International's open-agent architecture (OAA) and SAPHIRA robot-control system, we configured three physical robots and a set of software agents on the internet to plan and act in coordination. Users communicate with the robots using a variety of multimodal input: pen, voice, and keyboard. The robust capabilities of the OAA and SAPHIRA enabled us to design and implement a winning team in the six weeks before the Fifth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition.

Ballots will be due Applications of Artificial Intelligence have an accepted technical paper, back at the AAAI office no later than (IAAI-97) will be held in and then to students who are actively June 13. Conference on Knowledge Discovery are encouraged to apply. For further information be held November 8-10 at the Massachusetts following the American Statistical about the Scholarship Program, Institute of Technology in Association annual meeting in Anaheim. The topics Information about these conferences please contact AAAI at scholarships@aaai.org, of seven symposia will be: is available by writing to All student scholarship recipients Context in Knowledge Representation Registration materials for AAAI-97, will be required to participate in the and Natural Language Sasa IAAI-97, and KDD-97 are now available Student Volunteer Program to support Buvac (buvac@cs.stanford.edu), For further information, participation is a valuable contribution.