The 16th Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition will be held July 23-25, 2007, in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada), in conjunction with the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07). The mobile robot program serves the research community in two ways. First, it provides a venue for demonstrations of the latest research in AI and robotics. Second, robot program activities serve as a terrific opportunity for exposing undergraduate and graduate students to the latest research in AI and for allowing them to make valuable connections early in their research careers. From new approaches to canonical robotics problems to groundbreaking research in emerging areas, the mobile robot program provides a forum for a diverse range of projects in mobile robotics. Recent years have witnessed a rise in the accessibility of mobile robot platforms with reasonably capable platforms being available for relatively low cost and not requiring a substantial effort to build hardware or software architectures. Some participants exhibit a range of projects using commodity robots, while others showcased unique construction. As robots become more accessible, the robot program is able to showcase work from a wide range of contributors. For the past two years, the event has increasingly promoted research projects that encourage human-machine interaction as well as adaptation and learning in natural human settings. This trend is one that will continue in 2007, where the program will include two challenges: Semantic Robot Vision (SRVC) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).
This is funding to support travel to and participation by student teams from the United States in the HRI challenge, which will provide a structured framework that allows teams to compete directly in seven predefined categories that are aimed at human-robot interaction and involve activities that intrinsically integrate perception and action. There are six separate categories that the robots can enter: recognition of and reaction to human motions and/or gesture; emotion recognition and appropriate emotion expression; natural language understanding and action execution; perceptual learning through human teaching and subsequent, recognition and categorization of people, objects, locations or actions; perception, reasoning, and action; and shared attention, common workspace, intent detection. The seventh and final category is the integration challenge - that is, a demonstration of an extended, multimodal interaction that combines at least three of the above six categories. Judges will evaluate the AI techniques employed and their level of sophistication. The results of the event will be disseminated through abstracts in the AAAI-07 conference proceedings, through research papers in the proceedings of the mobile robot workshop, and via a summary article in AI Magazine.
Broader Impacts: The annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition is the only major venue that establishes and maintains the vital connection between the robotics and AI communities. Thus, these events have the potential to significantly impact robotics education and research. Exhibits will identify and publicize innovative educational programs that show how mobile robotics can be used as a motivating domain in the classroom and the research lab. The organizers will make special efforts to recruit participants for the event that specifically target student populations and institutions that are often under-represented in the field.
