The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic "avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.

The AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation (held during the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence) showcased advances in mobility and manipulation through a half-day workshop and an exhibition. The workshop focused on possible solutions to both technical and organizational challenges to mobility and manipulation research. This article presents the highlights of that discussion along with the content of the accompanying exhibits.

Moving toward true robot autonomy may require new paradigms, hardware, and ways of thinking. The goal of the AAAI 2008 Workshop on Mobility and Manipulation was not only to demonstrate current research successes to the AAAI community but also to road-map future mobility and manipulation challenges that create synergies between artificial intelligence and robotics. The half-day workshop included both a session on the exhibits and a panel discussion. The panel consisted of five prominent researchers who led a discussion of future directions for mobility and manipulation research. Andrew Ng of Stanford University (along with students Ashutosh Saxena and Ellen Klingbeil) focuses on opening arbitrary doors through learning a few visual keypoints, such as the location and type of door handle.

Developments in mechanical control and complex motion planning have enabled robots to become almost commonplace in situations requiring precise but menial, tedious, and repetitive tasks. Recent robotics research has targeted the mechanical and computational challenges inherent in performing a much broader range of tasks autonomously. These problems are less well-defined, requiring greater intelligence, commonsense reasoning, and oftentimes novel solutions. By most definitions, creativity (the generation of novel and useful ideas) is necessary for intelligence; thus research efforts focusing on robotics and creativity are also efforts toward artificial intelligence. As robots and computer physical systems become more capable, they are increasingly useful in the study of creativity itself.

The Fifteenth Annual AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition was held at the Twenty-First 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 Fifteenth Annual AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition was held at the Twenty-First 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.