The AAAI Robot Competition

                                Reid Simmons
                             Research Scientist
                         Carnegie Mellon University

For the past three years, AAAI has sponsored a mobile robot competition, the
purpose of which is to showcase the state of the art in autonomous indoor
mobile robots.  This year, I organized the competition, which consisted of
two events: office navigation (in corridors and offices) and office cleanup
(finding and picking up trash on the floor).  A dozen robots participated in
the competition, from a five foot tall hovercraft to a foot-long robot,
aptly named "Erratic".  In this talk, I will present the rationale behind
the design of the competition, describe (and illustrate) the how the robots
performed and the various technologies employed, and explain what the
results say about the state of autonomous mobile robots.  I will also
present some lessons learned about the difficulty of designing fair and
adequate benchmark tasks.