The 1994 AAAI Robot-Building Laboratory

The 1994 AAAI Robot-Building Laboratory (RBL-94), held during the Twelfth Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), was the second robot-building event offered at the national AI conference. The event was meant to appeal to the hacker yearnings of participants to experience for themselves the joys and excitement of constructing a robot and to learn about the real problems of such an endeavor. RBL-94 was inspired by and shared a common history with a couple of robot-building laboratories. In tracing the roots of RBL-94, one has to go back to the electrical engineering 6.270 course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).1 The 6.270 course is financially supported by MIT and outside sponsors. It is a student-organized event held every year in January. A tradition of the event is that 6.270 participants, or graduates from previous years, become organizers for the next year. Some of these organizers have recently decided to make the technology developed for the 6.270 courses available to a wider audience. In particular, Pankaj Oberoi founded 6.270 Technologies, which sells the robot kits, and Randy Sargent and Anne Wright develop and market INTERACTIVE C (IC). Several generations of 6.270 organizers contributed to the documentation.2 Sometime around 1992, David Miller and Lynn Stein, both at MIT at the time, decided to organize the first robot-building laboratory (RBL-93) at AAAI-93 in Washington, D.C. (Kadie 1993). They recruited several 6.270 organizers to prepare all the materials, manage and supervise the lab, and provide teaching assistance. Funding from the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and other agencies made it possible. The fee for participating in RBL-93 was low, but all participants were required to take the Mobile Robots I Tutorial given by David Miller and Mark Slack. About 70 people signed up for RBL-93. The more than 20 teams created a lot of activity and excitement in a small designated area right next to the exhibition and the big robot competition. The contests generated a lot of excitement and enthusiasm among both the participants and the audience. There were many requests for further information and some expression of disappointment from other AAAI-93 visitors about having missed the chance to participate. This enthusiasm and some ongoing discussions on a mailing list for RBL-93 led to the formation of an RBL-94 committee composed of RBL-93 participants. Proposals were written, budgets defined, technology issues discussed, and contest ideas evaluated. With a lot of help from AAAI, RBL-94 finally happened.