Flying: At the sixth annual Aerial Robot Competition (July 14, Epcot Center, Orlando, Fla.), the homemade robots of 14 teams–helicopters, blimps and tilted-wing airplanes–will lift off from, fly to and hover over a simulated waste dump, then map the area by reading labels on the waste drums. The mission is a success if the robot can also retrieve an orange magnet at the site. Sound easy? The robots can’t get any help from their handlers and have one hour to finish. In past years, some of the finest minds in AI have watched their creations break, crash or–in the case of one blimp built by a German team–wander toward nearby power lines.
Navigating: In this year’s Mobile Robot Competition (July 27-31, Providence, R.I.), part of the annual conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, robots will scour a cluttered room for specific objects like a TV remote control. They’ll also attempt to vacuum a three-room area and serve hors d’oeuvres to conference attendees. In the most ambitious event, inspired by NASA’s Pathfinder mission, robots will navigate across a rock-strewn “Martian” surface and collect a series of “life forms,” represented by moving balls. All of these events, says Brown University’s Tom Dean, “require a lot of knowledge about the world. The hardest part is dealing with the richness and complexity and exceptions to every rule.”
For conference attendees who want to get more interactive, a Hall of Champions exhibit allows them to challenge the best computer programs in games like checkers, chess, Othello, Go and bridge. Some of these, like checkers, poker and backgammon, are already dominated by computers.
Teaming up: Soccer, believe it or not, is the game of this year’s most intriguing event, RoboCup (Aug. 23, Nagoya, Japan). In small- and medium-size robot leagues, teams of five robots apiece will duel with miniature balls and goals. In the medium-size league, robots have a maximum diameter of 50 centimeters and play on a field the size of nine Ping-Pong tables. All the robots sport wheels (bipedal motion is not advanced enough), while central computers instruct the players via radio signals. Contest creator Hiroaki Kitano, full of the grand vision typical to AI researchers, says the eventual goal of the contest is to have robots compete in the real World Cup. Since that’s many decades away from happening, Kitano is happy just to stimulate research into the tricky problem of getting computers to work together, an area called multiagent collaboration. Applications of this field include robots teaming up in deep space and on rescue missions. Next to the computers in all these contests, Deep Blue’s task seems easy. Somebody should buy it some sneakers.
