The AAAI 2008 Robotics and Creativity Workshop

In 2008, the AAAI Robotics organizers eschewed the previous format of a Robot Competition, choosing instead to focus on groundbreaking work representing two areas of robotics: creativity and mobility and manipulation (detailed in a separate article). Both workshops were held on July 14, and the Robotics Exhibition included participants from both categories. The Robotics and Creativity Workshop was made possible through the support of the National Science Foundation's CreativeIT program and Microsoft Research. Developments in mechanical control and complex motion planning have enabled robots to become almost commonplace in situations requiring precise but menial, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Recent robotics research has targeted the mechanical and computational challenges inherent in performing a much broader range of tasks autonomously.