The project serves to support team travel to the 2010 AAAI Robotics Exhibition and Workshop. The exhibition and workshop overlaps with the 2010 AAAI Conference being held in Atlanta July 11-15, 2010. The Exhibition and Workshop revolves around the theme of manipulation and learning. Events include robot challenges, demonstrations and presentations. Funds will be used to support about 40 students and their advisors for team travel.
The 2010 AAAI Robotics Workshop and Exhibition addressed the need for integration between the artificial intelligence research that focuses on controlled simulations and robotics research that focuses on adapting to real world situations. The full day workshop, "Enabling Intelligence through Middleware", discussed the role of software in allowing investments to be reused across the research community. The outcome of this workshop was an article that compared and contrasted software strategies and highlighted future goals in robotics software. The exhibition, held over three days, contained both challenges and exhibits. The challenges are important because they allow researchers to benchmark different approaches to several important problems in identical conditions. The small-scale mobile manipulation challenge consisted of intelligent chess-playing robots that identified the opponent’s move, determined the next best move and used a robot hand to move the correct piece to the new position. Although chess may appear to be a "toy" problem, it was selected because the component skills (manipulation while moving and visual identification) are key to successfully using robots in safety and security applications (i.e. searching car trunks and glove compartments). The learning by demonstration challenge focused on the techniques needed to successfully teach robots to perform tasks that would be too dangerous for humans to undertake. The third challenge focused educating new computer scientists and roboticists by providing simpler problems less advanced students. Having students solve simpler problems works well because not only do students get the experience of using their robot algorithms outside of the lab, but students also participate in the workshop and exhibition, giving them important access to advanced techniques and researchers. The exhibition showcased the robots and researchers involved in the challenges. The exhibition consisted of research groups from 20 schools. The exhibition was open to both conference attendees and the public. One of the highlights of the exhibition was having high students play games of chess against the intelligent robots. The NSF funds were used to provide partial travel support to students and researchers involved in the workshop, challenges and exhibitions.
