The AAAI-2002 Robot Exhibition

The AAAI Robot Exhibition offers robotics researchers a venue for live demonstrations of their current projects and gives others an opportunity to see a selection of current research work. At the 2002 exhibition in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 12 robots were demonstrated by a variety of laboratories and institutions. Many of these systems were works in progress, providing the audience an opportunity to see snapshots of research programs in midphase. Contributors ranged from independent undergraduate projects to large multilab efforts. Despite the range of robots and researchers, there were nonetheless a number of recurring themes worth noting. Robotic systems for urban search and rescue (USAR), an area of growing interest for several years, have continued to develop. Human-robot interaction is another dominant theme as researchers strive to build systems that can truly cooperate with humans. Multimodule systems, either in the form of robots that can reconfigure themselves by rearranging their own components or in distributed robot teams where the components are physically separate autonomous agents, are another popular area of research. Not surprisingly, many human-robot systems and multirobot systems are designed for USAR and other search tasks. Another cluster of related themes we see is the use of robots in contexts such as hobbies, education, and entertainment, where in some sense the real goal of the system—whether the robot “realizes” it or not—is to make a change in the user, not in the world. Robot hardware design is of course also a common theme. Custom research robots are often dependent on the availability of cheap, versatile components that can be plugged together relatively easily without large investments in design or fabrication. Mainstays of the field, such as Legos, model-airplane servomotors, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) HANDY BOARD, are being augmented by new components, such as palmtop computers and the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) CMUCAM, that provide considerably more sensing and computation than were previously available. The remainder of this article provides, in alphabetical order, brief discussions of each of the entries based on text provided by their respective designers. The reader should assume that anything smart in the following pages is owed to the researchers, and anything incoherent is owed to poor editing on my part. It should also be mentioned that in the twentyfirst century, we not only have the problem of what pronoun to use for individuals of unspecified gender (he, she, or they) but of what pronoun to use for robots (he, she, or it). Although different researchers have adopted different conventions, I have chosen to use it here for uniformity. I hope to see the day when the robots themselves will either confirm my choice or reject it.