The 1994 AAAI Robot-Building Laboratory (RBL-94) was held during the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The primary goal of RBL-94 was to provide those with little or no robotics experience the opportunity to acquire practical experience in a few days. Thirty persons, with backgrounds ranging from university professors to practitioners from industry, participated in the three-part lab. The event was meant to appeal to the hacker yearnings of participants to experience for themselves the joys and excitement of constructing a robot and to learn about the real problems of such an endeavor. RBL-94 was inspired by and shared a common history with a couple of robot-building laboratories.

A robot-building lab and contest was held at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams of three worked day and night for 72 hours to build tabletop autonomous robots of legos, a small microcontroller board, and sensors. The robots then competed head to head in two events. The contest was a chance to learn about building machines that operate in the real world. The lab was in a roped-off area of the main exhibition area.

The 1994 AAAI Robot-Building Laboratory (RBL-94) was held during the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The primary goal of RBL-94 was to provide those with little or no robotics experience the opportunity to acquire practical experience in a few days. Thirty persons, with backgrounds ranging from university professors to practitioners from industry, participated in the three-part lab.

A robot-building lab and contest was held at the Eleventh National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams of three worked day and night for 72 hours to build tabletop autonomous robots of legos, a small microcontroller board, and sensors. The robots then competed head to head in two events. This article contains my personal recollections of the lab and contest.