In July 1997, the Sixth Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was held. The competition consisted of four new events: (1) Find Life on Mars; (2) Find the Remote; (3) Home Vacuum; and (4) Hors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? The robot exhibition was the largest in AAAI history. This article presents the history, motivation, and contributions for the 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.

A wide variety of robotics research was demonstrated at the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Exhibition. Twenty-one robotic teams participated, making it the largest exhibition ever. This article describes the robotics research presented by the participating teams.

The Find-Life-on-Mars event of the 1997 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition featured robots trying to find and collect stationary and moving colored objects in an arena littered with real rocks. The 2- day event had 11 entries participating in both single- robot and multirobot categories, both with and without manipulators. During the event, many of the robots successfully demonstrated object recognition, obstacle avoidance, exploration, and the collection and depositing of objects.

This article describes a milestone in our research efforts toward the real robot competition in RoboCup. We participated in the middle-size league at RoboCup-97, held in conjunction with the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Nagoya, Japan. The most significant features of our team, TRACKIES, are the application of a reinforcement learning method enhanced for real robot applications and the use of an omnidirectional vision system for our goalie that can capture a 360-degree view at any instant in time. The method and the system used are shown with competition results.

Five teams entered their robotic waiters into the contest. After a preliminary round to judge the safety of the robots, the robots served conference attendees at the opening reception of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Robot soccer competition provides an excellent opportunity for integrated robotics research. All these tasks demand robots that are autonomous (sensing, thinking, and acting as independent creatures), efficient (functioning under time and resource constraints), cooperative (collaborating with each other to accomplish tasks that are beyond an individual's capabilities), and intelligent (reasoning and planning actions and perhaps learning from experience). Furthermore, all these capabilities must be integrated into a single and complete system, which raises a set of challenges that are new to individual research disciplines. At RoboCup-97, held as part of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, these integrated robots performed well, and our DREAMTEAM won the world championship in the middle-size robot league.

In computational cognitive modeling, we hypothesize internal mental processes of human cognitive activities and express such activities by computer programs. Such computational models often consist of many components and aspects. Claims are often made that certain aspects play a key role in modeling, but such claims are sometimes not well justified or explored. We then discuss, in principle, systematic ways of identifying the source of power in models.

The 1997 AAAI Workshop on AI Approaches to Fraud Detection and Risk Management brought together over 50 researchers and practitioners to discuss problems of fraud detection, computer intrusion detection, and risk scoring. This article presents highlights, including discussions of problematic issues that are common to these application domains, and proposed solutions that apply a variety of AI techniques.

We applied mobile computing to community support and explored mobile computing with a large number of terminals. This article reports on the Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS'96) Mobile Assistant Project that was conducted at an actual international conference for multiagent systems using 100 personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones. We supported three types of service: (1) communication services such as e-mail and net news; (2) information services such as conference, personal, and tourist information; and (3) community support services such as forum and meeting arrangements. Participants showed a deep interest in mobile computing for community support.