The Home-Vacuum Event

After a summary of the rules, we outline the high and low points of the competition. Then we suggest ways such competitions could better accommodate new teams in the future. As early as 1993, it was apparent that industrial vacuuming robots were emerging as autonomous and well behaved at least in large industrial areas (Bonasso, Miller, and Kuipers 1993). Devising a sweep pattern on a bounded uncluttered surface to ensure complete coverage is a well-formed and solved problem. AI had nothing to contribute with regard to the basic cleaning task.