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AAAI/RoboCup-2001 Urban Search and Rescue Events
Murphy, Robin, Blitch, John, Casper, Jennifer
The RoboCup Rescue Physical Agent League Competition was held in the summer of 2001 in conjunction with the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition Urban Search and Rescue event, eerily preceding the September 11 World Trade Center (WTC) disaster. Four teams responded to the WTC disaster through the auspices of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR), directed by John Blitch. Blitch, through his position as program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Mobile Robots Program, was a supporter of the competition; he also served as a member of the rules committee and a judge. USF participated by chairing the rules committee, judging, assisting with the logistics, providing commentary, and demonstrating tethered and wireless robots whenever entrants had to skip around during the competition.
AAAI Hosts the National Botball Tournament!
Stein, Cathryne, Schein, Darcy, Miller, David
Botball is a national program in which teams of middle and high school students design, build, and program small autonomous mobile robots to compete in a highly charged interactive (but nondestructive) tournament. Botball students learn to program in c, construct feedback and control loops, create electromechanical systems, and integrate it all together while they work on a team. Botball takes place in regional tournaments across the country and culminates in a National Botball Tournament traditionally hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence at its annual conference. This program puts reusable equipment into schools and, at the Botball Teacher Workshops, trains teachers in robotics and the integration of robotics into their curriculum.
Ten Years of the AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition
Summer 2001 marked the tenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. A decade of contests and exhibitions have inspired innovation and research in AI robotics. We also reflect on how the contest has served as an arena for important debates in the AI and robotics communities. The article closes with a speculative look forward to the next decade of AAAI robot competitions.
The Hors d'Oeuvres Event at the AAAI-2001 Mobile Robot Competition
Michaud, Francois, Gustafson, David A.
Serving hors d'oeuvres is not as easy as it might seem! You have to move carefully between people, gently and politely offer them hors d'oeuvres, make sure that you have not forgotten to serve someone in the room, and refill the serving tray when required. These are the challenges that robots have to face in the Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone?
The AAAI-2001 Mobile Robot Exhibition
The 2001 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition provided an opportunity for AI researchers to interact and share ideas. Despite some difficulties with environment and timing, the primary objective of disseminating information was achieved. A short summary of each robot demonstrates the variety in form and function among the exhibitions.
Case-Based Reasoning Integrations
Marling, Cynthia, Sqalli, Mohammed, Rissland, Edwina, Munoz-Avila, Hector, Aha, David
This article presents an overview and survey of current work in case-based reasoning (CBR) integrations. There has been a recent upsurge in the integration of CBR with other reasoning modalities and computing paradigms, especially rule-based reasoning (RBR) and constraint-satisfaction problem (CSP) solving. CBR integrations with modelbased reasoning (MBR), genetic algorithms, and information retrieval are also discussed. This article characterizes the types of multimodal reasoning integrations where CBR can play a role, identifies the types of roles that CBR components can fulfill, and provides examples of integrated CBR systems.