The AAAI 2011 Robot Exhibition

at AAAI, chaired by Andrea L. Thomaz. The program has a long tradition of demonstrating innovative research at the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence. In both the workshop and exhibition portions of the event, we strive to have the robotics program be a venue that pushes the science of embodied AI forward. Over the past few years, a central point of the event has been the discussion of common robot platforms and software, with the primary goal of focusing the research community’s energy toward common “challenge” tasks. On the day before the exhibition the participants convened a workshop of 18 short talks. Each track’s exhibitors presented a summary of their exhibit. In addition, four guest speakers provided a broader context for all of the exhibitors’ efforts. The first guest speaker was the National Science Foundation’s Sven Koenig, who highlighted several federal programs that support projects in embodied intelligence. Koenig also provided insights into some of these program’s specific priorities, such as international collaborations and educational engagement. Guest speakers from Willow Garage and Bosch presented cutting-edge work with the PR2, Willow’s mobile two-arm manipulator platform.1 Bosch detailed its Remote Lab, which provides researchers anywhere with full access to the sensing and mobile manipulation capabilities of a PR2. Willow Garage featured some of its most recent work, in which point clouds (Anderson et al. 2011) are parsed not only to build generic three-dimensional scene models but also task-specific structures such as cabinet and drawer handles. Those structures, in turn, seed the automatic creation of task sequences for object retrieval in unconstrained human environments. Nataniel Dukan of Nao Robotics presented the workshop’s final guest talk, a broad overview of humanoid robotics’s current resources, along with a compelling vision for where those technologies will be in the next three to five years. Without providing specifics of Aldebaran’s unannounced plans, Dukan hinted that the actuation and sensing needed for comArticles