The Robot Competition

The Second Annual Robotics Competition and Exhibition was held in July 1993 in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This article reports some of my experiences in helping to design and run the contest and some reflections, drawn from post mortem abstracts written by the competitors, on the relation of the contest to current research efforts in mobile robotics. The competition, which attracted teams from many of the top mobile robotics research laboratories in the United States (see side bar), was first proposed by Thomas Dean and held at the 1992 NCAI conference. Dean's concept was to further the research into the skills such robots need--sensing, interpretation, planning, and reacting--by bringing together interested parties in a cooperative and challenging environment. Ideas should be tested in the real world, not just the controlled conditions of the laboratory.