Social Tag: Finding the Person with the Pink Hat

At the AAAI 2005 Robot Exhibition, the robot GRACE (Graduate Robot Attending a ConferencE, Fig. 1) will be playing a game that involves human-robot social interaction, navigation, and interface design. The task is for Grace to locate and rendezvous with one of our team members, who will be wearing a pink hat. The game can be seen as a social version of “tag” or “Marco Polo,” where the the robot finds the target not through the modalities of sight or sound, but rather through social interactions with strangers in the environment. The task has four phases (Fig. 2), which are repeated until the pink hat is located visually: