AAAI 2005 Robot Competition and Exhibition

July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, PA

Sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

[Results from the Event]
[Chairs] [Registration] [Travel Funding] [Workshop]
[Robot Challenge] [Scavenger Hunt] [Open Interaction Event] [Robot Exhibition] [Robot Exhibition]
[Sponsors]

The Fourteenth Annual Robot Competition and Exhibition will be held in Pittsburgh, PA, from July 9-13, 2005, in conjunction with the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This page contains information and links for potential participants. Questions or comments should be sent to Paul Rybski or Shiela Tejada, the general co-chairs for 2005. All teams should watch this page for updated information about the events.

Latest News

This year's event is over. The results have been posted below.

Results from this Year's Event

Thanks to everyone who made this year such an amazing success! Here are all of the awards from the competitions as well as specific techical awards.

Competition Awards
HMC Hammer	Harvey Mudd College	Scavenger Hunt First Place : Sony Aibo prize
Human Emulation Robots	Hanson Robotics	Open Interaction First Place : Evolution Robotics prize
LABORIUS	Universite de Sherbrooke	Challenge : ActivMedia prize
Technical Achievement Awards
LABORIUS	Universite de Sherbrooke	Map Building and HRI
HMC Hammer	Harvey Mudd College	Overall execellence for a fully autonomous system
UML Robotics Lab	UMass Lowell	Robust path finding and object recognition
UML Robotics Lab	UMass Lowell	Control Interface Usability
Claytronics	Carnegie Mellon University	Visionary Hardware Concept
NRL-MU	Naval Research Laboratory, U of Missouri-Columbia	Engaging Interaction Using a Cognitve Model
NRL-MU	Naval Research Laboratory, U of Missouri-Columbia	Innovative Interface
Academic Autonomy	Swarthmore College	Adaptive Vision for Lighting Conditions
Tekkotsu	Carnegie Mellon University	Visualization for Educational Robots
Honorable Mentions
Pink Team Searching	Carnegie Mellon University	Audience Participation
Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab	Drexel University	Promising Application and Domain
Kansas State University	Kansas State University	Adaptability and Disaster Recovery
Stony Brook Robot Design Team	Stony Brook University	Interdisciplinary Field Integration
CMDash'05	Carnegie Mellon University	Robust tracking and Real Time Adaptability
University of Pittsburgh	University of Pittsburgh	Potential for Social Impact

General Co-chairs

Sheila Tejada
sheila@cs.uno.edu

Paul Rybski
prybski@cs.cmu.edu

Invitation

We would like to invite you to participate in the Fourteenth Annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition, sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The Competition brings together teams from universities, colleges, and research laboratories to compete and to demonstrate cutting edge, state of the art research in robotics and artificial intelligence.

The 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Contest and Exhibition will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of AAAI-05. The dates are July 9-13, 2005. The program will include the Robot Challenge, the Open Interaction Event, the Robot Exhibition, and the Mobile Robot Workshop. Registration is now closed.

Important Dates

Deadlines for Registration and Conference Abstracts

All abstract submissions must be sent by email to Paul Rybski and Sheila Tejada by May 2, 2005 for review.

Once accepted, final abstracts with registration and payment are due to AAAI on May 10, 2005. Specific details about how to submit the abstracts will be sent to the authors directly.

All travel funding requests must be submitted no later than May 15, 2005 along with registration and payment.

The absolute final date to register for the event and reserve a table and poster area is May 31, 2005.

At the Conference

At the conference, teams will be allowed into the hotel to start setting up their equipment on July 9, 2005.

All teams will have to be packed up and moved out on July 13, 2005 by noon.

Venue and Schedule Information

Here are floorplans for the hotel. Most of the booths will be set up in the foyers on 3rd floor. The poster session will be held in the 3rd floor ballroom along with some of the events.

Second floor

Third floor

Here are some photos of the 2nd floor foyer, 3rd floor foyer, and ballroom. Most of the events will take place in the foyers but we may have access to the ballroom during the events which use that (reception and poster session).

See the photos here

Schedule

We are currently looking at two formal events in which teams will be able to demonstrate their robots and participate in the competition. They are:

Opening reception, Sunday July 10 from 6:00-8:00pm
Poster session, Tuesday July 12 from 5:30-8:30pm

The exact schedule for the competition events is still being determined, but suffice it to say that the finals will definitely be held during the poster session. Any qualifying or preliminary events will be held either during the opening reception or in the hallways/foyers during the day on monday.

All exhibits (from competitive teams or teams participating only in the exhibition) have the opportunity to have a booth on display in the hallways during the technical sessions, in the reception on sunday, and the poster session on tuesday. Because the cleanup and workshop is on wednesday, we will not have any events at that time.

The Robot Challenge

Chair:
Ashley Stroupe, Jet Propulsion Lab, Ashley.W.Stroupe@jpl.nasa.gov

In short, the robot is supposed to attend the conference. A breakdown of the tasks includes: starting at the entrance to the conference center and finding the registration desk, registering for the conference, performing volunteer duties as required, interacting with conference attendees, and finally reporting at a prescribed time to a conference hall to give a talk.

More details on the robot challenge task can be found here.

Scavenger Hunt

Chair:
Doug Blank, Bryn Mawr College, dblank@cs.brynmawr.edu

Robots search the conference hotel area for a checklist of given objects such as people or information located at specific locations or at a specific time. This task will require robots to navigate and map a dynamic area with moving objects/people in order to acquire objects to satisfy the checklist.

We welcome a variety of teams to enter with one or more robots and/or human operators, yet every entrant must demonstrate AI techniques during the competition. A key aspect of this event is having the robots interact with people in the environment during timed missions run throughout the course of the conference. More specific rules and guidelines will be posted shortly. We encourage urban search and rescue teams with AI components to consider joining this event.

More details on the scavenger hunt can be found here.

Open Interaction Task

Chair:
Ashley Stroupe, Jet Propulsion Lab, Ashley.W.Stroupe@jpl.nasa.gov

In addition to the above two events, there will be a third event involving human-robot interaction. This event will take the place of the Robot Host event in past years and will probably involve interacting with conference attendees to achieve a particular task in an unstructured environment.

More details on the open interaction task can be found here.

The Robot Exhibition

Education chair:
Lloyd Greenwald, Drexel University, lgreenwa@cs.drexel.edu

Research chair:
Magdalena Bugajska, Naval Research Labs, magda@aic.nrl.navy.mil

The mission of the Robot Exhibition is to demonstrate state of the art research in a less structured environment than the competition events. The exhibition gives researchers an opportunity to showcase current robotics and embodied-AI research that does not fit into the competition tasks.

The Mobile Robot Workshop

Workshop Chair:
Jeff Forbes

There will be a robotics workshop on the last day of the conference. Teams who receive travel support must attend and present at the workshop. All other participants are strongly encouraged to attend and present. A research paper will be required within one month after the end of the workshop, and will be published in a workshop proceedings by AAAI.

Travel Funding

Limited travel funding will be available. If you wish to receive travel funding, the deadline for registering your intent to participate is May 15, 2005 (via the web registration).

Participation Fees

Each team will be required to pay a $250 participation fee that will help AAAI to defray the cost of the competition. This fee is in line with fees charged by other competitive robotic events, and helps AAAI to move towards a sustainable funding model for the annual robot competition.

Advisor and Past Cochair

Bill Smart, Washington University in St. Louis, wds at cse dot wustl dot edu