The 2000 AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition

The events of the Ninth AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition, held 30 July to 3 August 2000, included the popular Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone? and Challenge events as well as a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. Here, I describe these events as well as the exhibition and the concluding workshop. This year's event brought six contest teams and nine exhibition teams from the United States and Canada. The Robot Contest and Exhibition brings together teams from universities and other laboratories to compete and demonstrate state-ofthe-art research in robotics and AI (figure 1). The contest and exhibit have several goals: (1) encourage students to enter robotics and AI fields at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, (2) increase awareness of the field, and (3) foster the sharing of research ideas and technology. The competition and exhibition is actually made up of multiple events: several contests, a challenge event, an exhibit, and a final workshop for all participants. Descriptions of previous years events can be found in Dean and Bonasso (1993); Konolige (1994); Simmons (1995); Hinkle, Kortenkamp and Miller (1996); Kortenkamp, Nourbakhsh, and Hinkle (1997); Arkin (1998); and Meeden et al. (2000). The competition this year consisted of two events: Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? and a new event, Urban Search and Rescue. The event stresses human-robot interaction, as well as mobility, and each contestant is required to explicitly and unambiguously demonstrate interaction with the spectators. The fourth year for this popular event, the robots are judged while they serve finger foods to attendees at the AI Festival. Unlike other contests over the years, there were no artificial walls or constraints in this event--the robots had to interact with regular conference participants, and no attempt was made to limit the number of people interacting with each robot. Robots were judged on the quality of their interactions, coverage, and ability to refill their trays (such as detecting when they needed a refill and navigating to a refill station). In January 2000, a suggestion was made to introduce a new contest, Urban Search and Rescue (USAR).