The AAAI 2006 Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition

The Fifteenth Annual AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition was held at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Boston, Massachusetts, in July 2006. This article describes the events that were held at the conference, including the Scavenger Hunt, Human Robot Interaction, and Robot Exhibition. The robot competition and exhibition has a long tradition of demonstrating innovative research in robotics (Rybski et al. 2006, Smart et al. 2005, Balch and Yanco 2005). From new approaches to canonical robotics problems to groundbreaking research in emerging areas, the robot program provides a forum for a diverse range of projects in mobile robotics. Recent years have witnessed a rise in the accessibility of mobile robot platforms with reasonably capable platforms being available for relatively low cost (Dodds and Tribblehorn 2006, Dodds et al. 2004) and not requiring a substantial effort to build hardware (Veloso et al. 2006) or software (Blank et al. 2003, Touretzky and Tira-Thompson 2005) architectures.