The Find-the-Remote Event

The Find-the-Remote event was considered the most challenging of the events in the 1997 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. It required a broad range of both hardware and software capabilities. I discuss the rules and rationale for the event as well as the results. It involved fetching a known set of objects from unknown, but constrained, locations in a known environment. In real life, such functions might be useful for in-home care of the elderly or the physically disabled. This event was extremely difficult because it forced teams to implement both manipulation (the grasping and moving of objects) and visual object recognition. Furthermore, it explicitly required teams to implement them for a wide range of objects. It therefore eliminated a broad range of special-purpose sensing and manipulation strategies that would be specific to one or another class of objects. It also required that objects be lifted from a variety of surfaces (real furniture) at a variety of heights.