Many Robots Make Short Work

1. Holding a meeting At the SRI Artificial Intelligence Lab, we have a long history of building autonomous robots, from the original Shakey (remember the STRIPS planner?) through Flakey [Congdon 1993] and more recently, the Pioneer class of small robots. Our current research focuses on realtime vision for robots, and multirobot planning using an agent-oriented architecture. For the AAAI contest, we wanted to showcase our research, especially the ability to control multiple robots using a distributed set of software agents on the Internet. The agent technology, called the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), was developed at SRI as a way of accessing many different types of information available in computers at different locations. In the "hold a meeting" event, a robot starts from the Director's office, determines which of two conference rooms is empty, notifies two professors where and when the meeting will be held, and then returns to tell the Director. Points are awarded for accomplishing the different parts of the task, for communicating effectively about its goals, and for finishing the task quickly. Our strategy was simple: use as many robots as we could to cut down on the time to find the rooms and notify the professors. We decided that three robots was an optimal choice: enough to search for the rooms efficiently, but not too many to get in each other's way or strain our resources. We would have two robots searching for the rooms and professors, and one remaining behind in the Director's office and tell her when the meeting would be. We were concerned that leaving one robot behind as a mobile telephone was stretching things a bit, so we cleared our strategy with the judges well before the contest. The two search robots are Pioneer-class robots, portable robots first developed by SRI for classroom use, and now manufactured by Real World Interfaces, Inc. They run SRI's Saphira control software, which navigates the robots around an office environment, keeping track of where they are using perceptual cues from the robot sensors. Each Pioneer robot has seven sonar sensors, a Fast Track vision system from Newton Labs, and a portable computer on top with a radio ethernet for communication to a base station. The Fast Track system is an interesting device: it consists of a small color video camera and a low-power processor. It can be trained to recognize particular colors, and will indicate the position …