Menlo Park, California — The Sixteenth Annual AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition continues to push the state-of-the-art of autonomous mobile robotics. From its inception, this competition has challenged top roboticists to develop and integrate new capabilities.
The Exhibition continues to attract highly innovative robots that intrigue conference attendees and media representatives. This year, for instance, Virginia Tech will exhibit DARwin, a humanoid bipedal robot research platform to study dynamic gaits and locomotion. It is also the first and only U.S. entry into the humanoid division of the international autonomous soccer competition, RoboCup.
The Robot Competition and Exhibition will take place July 23 to 26 in Balmoral at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, B.C.
Semantic Robot Vision Challenge
This year’s Competition is a new event that honors the tradition of pushing the envelope of what robots attempt. This year’s Semantic Robot Vision Challenge puts an entirely new twist on the challenge. Robots will be given a listing of objects that they must locate and recognize. In and of itself, this is a task that has been the basis of several past events such as picking up tennis balls, and searching for human bodies in the simulated rubble of a collapsed building.
What makes this year unique is that for the first time, the robots will be given an opportunity to search the Web for images of the objects in their list before starting their physical search. This competition will push the state-of-the-art of semantic image understanding by requiring that robots make use of the wealth of unstructured image data that exists on the Internet today.
In the past, no two competing teams have entered the same type of robot, which is part of the fascination of the event. While most have rolled along the ground, for instance, some have flown through the air.
Participating Teams
Among the teams participating in this year’s Robot Competition and Exhibition are:
- Brown University (Exhibition)
- Carnegie Mellon University (2 teams) /Intel (Exhibition)
- Duke University (Exhibition)
- Harvey Mudd College (Exhibition)
- Kansas State University (Competition)
- Microsoft Research, Georgia Tech, and Bryn Mawr College (Exhibition)
- MIT Media Lab (Exhibition)
- Princeton University/University of Illinois and Urbana-Champaign
- (Competition and Exhibition)
- Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville (Exhibition)
- Spelman College (Exhibition)
- Stanford University (Exhibition)
- University of British Columbia (Competition)
- University of Maryland (Exhibition)
- University of Manitoba (Exhibition)
- University of Washington (Competition and Exhibition)
- Virginia Tech (Exhibition)
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