A Retrospective of the AAAI Robot Competitions
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AI Magazine Volume 18 Number 1 (1997) (© AAAI) Articles A Retrospective of the AAAI Robot Competitions Pete Bonasso and Thomas Dean ■ This article is the content of an invited talk given this development. We found it helpful to by the authors at the Thirteenth National Confer- draw comparisons with developments in avia- ence on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96). The tion. The comparisons allow us to make use- piece begins with a short history of the competi- ful parallels with regard to aspirations, moti- tion, then discusses the technical challenges and vations, successes, and failures. the political and cultural issues associated with bringing it off every year. We also cover the sci- Dreams ence and engineering involved with the robot tasks and the educational and commercial aspects Flying has always seemed like a particularly of the competition. We finish with a discussion elegant way of getting from one place to of the community formed by the organizers, par- another. The dream for would-be aviators is ticipants, and the conference attendees. The orig- to soar like a bird; for many researchers in AI, inal talk made liberal use of video clips and slide the dream is to emulate a human. There are photographs; so, we have expanded the text and many variations on these dreams, and some added photographs to make up for the lack of resulted in several fanciful manifestations. In such media. the case of aviation, some believed that it should be possible for humans to fly by sim- here have been five years of robot com- ply strapping on wings. Early seventeenth- petitions and exhibitions, with the first century clockwork automata similarly sought Tevent held in San Jose, California, in to mimic the superficial aspects of humans, 1992 and the fifth held in Portland, Oregon, without any real understanding of how the in 1996. Since that first show, we have seen brain or the rest of the body worked. 30 different teams compete, and almost that There are obvious practical motivations for many more exhibit their robots. The event building robots. People have long yearned for has become a key attraction of the national mechanical servants to do their instant bid- and international conferences. In this article, ding and yet not burden their consciences. we look back on the form and function of the Such servants would do all the dirty work and five years of exhibitions and competitions never complain. They would be humanlike in and attempt to give you some insights into its their ability to understand what their human history, the technical developments, and the masters want, superhuman in their ability to political and cultural issues that the organiz- carry out their tasks, and yet somehow ers and teams faced over the years. We also unaware or joyfully accepting of their lot in try to give you a glimpse into the community life. Karel Capek’s play entitled R.U.R. and camaraderie that develops among the (Rossum’s Universal Robots) featured human- teams during the competitions. like robots that were designed to free humans from drudgery (Asimov 1990). However, the History robots didn’t like the drudgery any more than the humans; so, they revolted and fought for We begin with a quick history of the develop- their freedom. We are still not sure what types ment of intelligent robots to give a better of task robots should perform or how they sense of where the competition robots fit in might fit into society. Copyright © 1997, American Association for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. 0738-4602-1997 / $2.00 SPRING 1997 11 Articles Not all robotics researchers are focused on for Artificial Intelligence competition pro- reproducing human capabilities. Some duced robots with surprising skills (figure 1). researchers dream of building mechanical CARMEL won the 1992 search-and-navigate devices that mimic the behavior of simpler event with an as yet unmatched fast sonar- biological organisms such as insects. Most processing algorithm (Congdon et al. 1993). people don’t see any need for mechanical Stanford University’s DERVISH won the Office insects in a world infested with the biting, Navigation event in 1994 by maintaining stinging, disease-carrying sort, but for some, multiple possible states and pruning them it is a grand challenge to build a device as with disambiguating sensor data (Nour- adaptable and resourceful as the common bakhsh, Powers, and Birchfield 1995). LOLA cockroach. won the 1995 Trash Pickup event with a In the early years of flight, engineers tried seamless integration of navigation and to mimic the superficial aspects of winged manipulation (Gutierrez-Osuna and Luo flight. Ignorant of the subtleties of aerody- 1996). CAIR-2, winner of the 1995 navigation namics, the early attempts often failed dra- event, would accept navigation directions matically. In aviation, the hang glider was the from humans and ask for and accept help first step as people such as England’s Percy from humans when it got lost, all by means Pilcher and Germany’s Otto Lilienthal experi- of spoken language (Yang et al. 1996). mented with the lift and thrust forces evident However, in contrast to early flight, some of The Wright in bird’s wings. In robotics, the six-axis PUMA the first steps in building useful robotic tools arm epitomized the initial step toward practi- were easier to achieve. In particular, simple Brothers first cal robots in industry. However, in both disci- manipulation, painstakingly orchestrated set the world’s plines, there were a myriad of useful and not- under human control but flawlessly and record for the so-useful digressions. Early legged robots indefinitely repeated, was achieved with great looked almost as pathetic as the early precision early on by robot welders. Sustained longest attempts of humans to fly by flapping flight required at least a rudimentary under- hang-glider strapped-on wings. standing of aerodynamics and the invention of powerful yet light power plants. Interest- flight, and Early Successes ingly, the success of human-powered flight ROCKY II, a Eventually, spurred by requirements in the would have to wait until the development of government sector, early successes were superstrong, superlight space-age materials. behavior- achieved in both arenas. The Wright Brothers In robotics, one of the main technological based robot, first set the world’s record for the longest stumbling blocks with robots outside the fac- was the hang-glider flight, and ROCKY II, a behavior- tory, termed field robots, was the need for based robot, was the forerunner of the new sensing devices and the know-how to inter- forerunner of Mars Rover Program. Driven by military pret the data that they produce. Despite the the new requirements, powered flight soon followed, availability of relatively inexpensive digital but it was some time before airplanes were cameras, mobile robotics didn’t really take off Mars Rover used as a reliable tool in industrial and mili- until the introduction of two devices: (1) the Program. tary applications. Balloons were already being sonar transducer, made widely available by used for reconnaissance, so it was natural for the development of automated focusing sys- the military to use the more maneuverable tems in cameras, and (2) the infrared sensor, airplane for the same purposes. Mail delivery, used in automatic door openers and a host of crop dusting, passenger services, and a host of other common pieces of equipment. other applications followed suit, but it took The sonar and infrared sensors were cheap time for the fledgling aircraft industry to and plentiful, were relatively easy to interface prove itself up to the task. to computers, and provided a mobile robot We consider the robots of the competition with information about the distance to near- representative of this early success era, and by objects. Unfortunately, these devices pro- with funds provided by the Defense vided data that were noisy and difficult to Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) interpret. The underlying physics was rela- and the National Aeronautics and Space tively simple at the coarse level required for Administration (NASA), the caliber of robots applying these devices. The problem was increased with each year of the competition filtering out noise and fusing the information with such robots as SRI International’s FLAKEY from multiple devices or multiple readings (in competition) and IS Robotics GENGHIS (in from the same device to provide useful inter- exhibition). Just as aviation made strides in pretations of the data for navigation and its early success era, such as Lindbergh’s obstacle avoidance. This problem turned out transatlantic flight, the American Association to be unexpectedly complex. 12 AI MAGAZINE Articles Figure 1. Early Successes in the Robot Competition. Aviation had the transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh. The robot competition had its area and office arenas, which produced win- ners of navigation events such as the University of Michigan’s CARMEL and Stanford University’s DERVISH; trash-recycling robots such as North Carolina State University’s LOLA; and the smooth-mover CAIR-2, from Korea’s AI Institute, which used spoken language. Real Successes this sort of automation possible. Mobile robots are beginning to exhibit As we can recall real progress in aviation, we interesting behavior in both natural and can draw similar parallels with intelligent human-engineered environments. In these robots. Real successes in the aviation business cases, however, the opportunities for unantic- included large-capacity passenger jets and ipated events are much greater than in the faster intercontinental travel. Real success for commercial airline case. It’s this sort of open robots is being realized in the service indus- endedness that makes the realization of the try, where such robots as TRC’s HELPMATE (see dream of fully autonomous robots so www.helpmaterobotics.com) fetch and deliv- difficult.