The Hors d'Oeuvres Event at the AAAI-2001 Mobile Robot Competition

Serving hors d'oeuvres is not as easy as it might seem! You have to move carefully between people, gently and politely offer them hors d'oeuvres, make sure that you have not forgotten to serve someone in the room, and refill the serving tray when required. These are the challenges that robots have to face in the Hors d'Oeuvres, Any-one? event, part of the AAAI-2001 Mobile Robot Competition. H ors d'Oeuvres, Anyone? For the fifth year that this event has now been held, five entries took on the challenge of creating service robots who can offer hors d'oeuvres to attendees of the robot exhibition. Such robots require the ability to move safely in a crowded environment, cover a serving area, find and stop at people to offer food and interact with them, detect when more food is needed, and take the actions necessary to refill the serving tray. Although the research topics addressed by this event are mostly targeted at human-robot interaction, one additional requirement this year was that the robots had to wear a server's badge to allow possible interactions with robots from other teams. Interesting capabilities were demonstrated by all the entries. For example, Ron Nucci from the Seattle Robotics Club demonstrated a robot built completely with inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware (figure 1). The robot had voice-recognition capabilities using a demo program from Sensory Inc. called FLUENT SPEECH. A laser oriented toward the floor was able to detect people's feet, making the robot stop and start a dialogue with a potential customer. The entry from Kansas State University consisted of two Pioneer 2-DX robots, a butler named CADBURY and a host named RICHIE, working as a team to serve the guests (figure 2). CAD-BURY seeks out guests and interacts with them to serve hors d'oeuvres, and RICHIE welcomes guests. CADBURY had a web camera and an infrared sensor mounted to provide perception and sense the presence of people by their temperature. RICHIE had only a web camera and used vision identify faces. Standard audio devices were connected to both robots. Man-nequins were mounted on top of each robot to serve the twin purposes of giving the robots some color and increasing the range of their sensory devices. The robots communicated with each other through a local area network on wireless network cards on their laptop computers. Navigation was done using occupancy grids. The implemented strategy is as follows: CADBURY locates …