aaairobotics 2010 - The 2010 AAAI Robotics Exhibition and Workshop featuring aaairobotics2010

The 2010 AAAI Robotics Exhibition and Workshop featuring

Learning by Demonstration Challenge

Small Scale Manipulation Challenge: Robotic Chess

Student Research Challenge

The Robot Exhibition featuring 2010 ICRA Mobile Manipulation Demonstration

Workshop: Enabling Intelligence through Middleware

and

2010 AAAI Semantic Robot Vision Challenge

July 11-15, 2010
Atlanta, GA, USA

The Nineteenth Edition of Robotics Program at AAAI features the long-standing Robotics Exhibitions as well as demonstration and challenges in emerging areas of robotics research. The Robotics Program has a long tradition of demonstrating innovating research in robotics at the intersection with artificial intelligence. This year, the AAAI-10 Robotics Program will feature an open robotics exhibition, demonstrations for intelligent robotics challenge problems, and a workshop to present current results and discuss future directions.

Moving forward, the theme for AAAI-10 Robotics is “Enabling Intelligence through Middleware“. This theme aims to cultivate challenge experiments to advance specific problems in robotics research and education. Each challenge is intended to be an experiment designed to motivate and evaluate an individual function of artificial intelligence for robotics, similar to the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge at AAAI-07. These challenges are meant to identify problems of interest as well as promote common metrics and experiments that are reproducible by individual researchers.

Semantic Robot Vision Challenge
The Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (abbreviated SRVC) is a research competition that is designed to push the state of the art in image understanding and automatic acquisition of knowledge from large unstructured databases of images (such as those generally found on the web). In this competition, fully autonomous robots receive a text list of objects that they are to find. They use the web to automatically find image examples of those objects in order to learn visual models. These visual models are then used to identify the objects in the robot's cameras.

Learning by Demonstration Challenge
This The 2010 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence will be hosting the second annual exhibit and challenge on robot Learning by Demonstration (LbD). The purpose of this event is to bring together research and commercial groups to demonstrate complete platforms performing LbD tasks. Our long-term aim is to define increasingly challenging experiments for future LbD events and greater scientific understanding of the area. We welcome contributions that demonstrate physically embodied robots learning a task or skill from a human teacher.

Small Scale Manipulation Challenge: Robotic Chess
The ICRA-2010 and AAAI-2010 Small-Scale Manipulation Challenge is designed to highlight advances in embodied intelligence using smaller than human size robots. Robotic chess requires the integration of sensing, planning and actuation and provides an opportunity for performance on a common, well-defined task.

Student Research Challenge
The AAAI 2010 Student Robotics Challenge invites entries by teams or individuals. Entries consist of one or more physical robots that will
exhibit a subset of these skills:

exploration -- safely traversing the environment
manipulation -- gathering landmarks or other tokens from the environment
modeling -- collecting and reporting information about the surroundings and/or landmarks

These three skills certainly occupy a central place in embodied AI. However, in order to offer an event that supports existing curricula as much as possible, these tasks are also quite flexible. For example, teams are encouraged to augment the environment with landmarks of their own choosing or design. Teams are also encouraged to choose hardware, software, and algorithmic approaches that enhance and extend class projects, independent studies, and/or research into AI robotics.

Mobile Manipulation Demonstration
This Participants in the 2010 Mobile Manipulation Challenge held in Anchorage AK will showcase their entries. High-level autonomous tasks include object retrieval and dishwasher loading. Additional information on that challenge can be found at http://www.willowgarage.com/mmc10.

Workshop: Enabling Intelligence through Middleware
This workshop focuses on how to leverage robotics knowledge and research in other communities through the use of standardized middleware. Very few existing robotics development architectures are used outside of the group developing them. In addition, algorithms and approaches developed in one architecture are rarely ported to another, creating a barrier to reusing good solutions and hampers the ability to validate results in more than one environment.

This workshop features a panel discussion led by prominent architecture research groups. The goal is to create a roadmap to common environments and tools. This workshop will also feature presentations by exhibitors in challenge areas that highlight current research.

Call for Participation

AAAI-10 Robotics Workshop: Enabling Intelligence through Middleware

The AAAI-10 workshop will feature researchers that contribute to the design, implementation or use of robotics middleware. The goal is to examine the state of robotics middleware and map out future directions that increase usability, robustness and component reuse. Participants are invited to showcase middleware innovations as exhibitors through demonstrations.

Those interested in exhibiting should prepare a 1-2 page proposal containing:

(1) the names and affiliation of the exhibitors;

(2) a summary of the objectives and methods of the underlying research; and

(3) description or visual of what the exhibit (or video) will show.

The proposal must be emailed to Monica Anderson by April 1, 2010 as a PDF document.

All participants accepted for the Robotics Exhibition and Challenges are invited to participate in the AAAI-10 Robotics Workshop. Proposals for participation in the workshop alone will not be considered.

AAAI-10 Robotics Exhibition

The Robotics Exhibition is open to demonstrations in all areas of robotics research, education, and commercial development. Demonstrations are preferred to be live demonstrations of robots in action, but can also be combined video and poster presentations of interesting robotics projects.

Those interested in exhibiting should prepare a 1-2 page proposal containing:

(1) the names and affiliation of the exhibitors;

(2) a summary of the objectives and methods of the underlying research; and

(3) description or visual of what the exhibit (or video) will show.

The proposal must be emailed to Monica Anderson by April 1, 2010 as a PDF document.

AAAI-10 Robotics Challenges

Participation in the Semantic Robot Vision, Chess and Learning by Demonstration challenge will be handled by the organizers of each event. Each challenges has a specific time-table that includes submission of intent, qualification and registration. Please refer to the websites for the individual challenge questions or consult the corresponding organizers.

Semantic Robot Vision Challenge - http://www.semantic-robot-vision-challenge.org/
Learning by Demonstration Challenge - http://web.media.mit.edu/~chernova/aaai2010lbd/Hom...
Small Scale Manipulation Challenge: Robotic Chess - http://aaai-robotics.ning.com/forum/topics/icra201...
Student Research Challenge - http://www.cs.hmc.edu/ijcai09urc/

Travel Support

Partial travel support may be available for participants.
Important Dates (tentative)

11/15/09 Call for Participation Announced
02/01/10 Intention to Participate in Challenges Due (see individual website for submission details)
03/01/10 1-2 page Challenge Qualification Due (see individual submission website for details)
04/01/10 1-page Workshop Exhibition Proposal Due
05/01/10 Notification of Acceptance
05/01/10 Travel Support Notification
06/15/10 Slide for Programs Due
06/15/10 AAAI Registration Forms Due
07/11/10 AAAI 2010 (July 11-15th)