The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002) Robot Challenge is part of an annual series of robot challenges and competitions. It is intended to promote the development of robot systems that interact intelligently with humans in natural environments. The Challenge task calls for a robot to attend the AAAI conference, which includes registering for the conference and giving a talk about itself. In this article, we review the task requirements, introduce the robots that participated at AAAI-2002 and describe the strengths and weaknesses of their performance. The purpose of the challenge is to promote the development of robot systems that interact intelligently with humans in natural environments.

"It was good to see the number of student attendees up," noted American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) President Tom Mitchell, "and that our attendance was so high despite the economic downturn. I think the meeting was even more stimulating because of the co-location of AAAI with so many other conferences in Edmonton at the same time." This article provides a few snapshots of the vast and varied content of the 2002 conferences. Proceedings of AAAI-02 and IAAI-02 are available from AAAI Press (www.aaaipress.org). AAAI is grateful for the outstanding work of the conference committee members as well the support of the following organizations for this year's conference: Association of Computing Machinery SIGART, Alberta Informatics Circle of Research Excellence (iCORE), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NASA Ames Research Center, the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), and the Naval Research Laboratory.

The thirteenth AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition was once again collocated with AAAI-2204, in San Jose, California. As in previous years, the robot events drew competitors from both academia and industry to showcase state-ofthe-art mobile robot software and systems in four organized events. The primary purpose of the Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition is to bring together researchers and students from academe and industry to showcase the latest state-of-the-art mobile robot capabilities. This year saw the return of the Rescue Robot Competition, the Mobile Robot Exhibition, and the Robot Challenge, and the addition of a new event, the Open Interaction Event. For the fifth time, the Rescue Robot Competition was run at AAAI, helping raise awareness of the unique challenges involved in urban search and rescue (USAR) operations.

The Eleventh Annual AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition was held at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in August 2002. This article describes each of the events that were held: Robot Challenge, Robot Exhibition, Robot Host, and Robot Rescue. Usually those attendees with names beginning AL are encouraged to line up behind one desk, and M-Z line up behind another. However, the 2002 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence included another desk: Robots! Some robots at the 2002 American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition actually registered for the conference on their own.

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated. At the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see "A Transformer Wins DARPA's $2 Million Robotics Challenge"). Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings. "I think this is an opportunity for everybody to see how hard robotics really is," says Mark Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, now owned by Google, which produced an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot called Atlas (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agile Robots").

Two overarching goals were promoted for the 2005 Mobile Robot Competition. The first was to give the competitions an exhibitionstyle format to make them as accessible to different areas of research as possible. This was change would place the competitions and exhibitions demonstrated at the Fourteenth Annual AAAI directly in line with the conference, Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, an teams would need to handle the challenges involved event hosted at the Twentieth National Conference with noisy, cluttered, and unstructured on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2005). The robot event had a particularly strong human environments. Scavenger Hunt: Autonomous robots were required to search a cluttered and crowded environment This year, AAAI changed the venue format for a defined list of objects and were from a convention center to a hotel setting. The Scavenger as defined by the team, and feedback Hunt event was organized by Douglas from the participants. Blank from Bryn Mawr College, the Robot Robot Challenge: Robots were required to attend Challenge and the Open Interaction Task were the conference autonomously, including organized by Ashley Stroupe from the Jet registering for the conference, navigating the Propulsion Laboratory, the research component conference hall, talking with attendees, and of the exhibition was organized by Magdalena answering questions.

The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002) Robot Challenge is part of an annual series of robot challenges and competitions. It is intended to promote the development of robot systems that interact intelligently with humans in natural environments. The Challenge task calls for a robot to attend the AAAI conference, which includes registering for the conference and giving a talk about itself. In this article, we review the task requirements, introduce the robots that participated at AAAI-2002 and describe the strengths and weaknesses of their performance.

The Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2002) Robot Challenge is part of an annual series of robot challenges and competitions. It is intended to promote the development of robot systems that interact intelligently with humans in natural environments. The Challenge task calls for a robot to attend the AAAI conference, which includes registering for the conference and giving a talk about itself. In this article, we review the task requirements, introduce the robots that participated at AAAI-2002 and describe the strengths and weaknesses of their performance.

Usually those attendees with names any of the events (YSC, an Iranian team, took beginning AL are encouraged to line up behind top honors in the Rescue event). Some robots at the 2002 American Association In 2002, the event was organized by Holly for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Mobile Yanco of the University of Massachusetts at Robot Competition and Exhibition actually Lowell and Tucker Balch of the Georgia Institute registered for the conference on their of Technology. The Robot Challenge was own. Robot annual competition and exhibition, making it Host was cochaired by David Gustafson of the oldest AIcentric mobile robot competition. Kansas State University and Francois Michaud The event included three competitions of Universite de Sherbrooke.