The AAAI 2011 Robot Exhibition

Abstract

In this article we report on the exhibits and challenges shown at the AAAI 2011 Robotics Program in San Francisco. The event included a broad demonstration of innovative research at the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence. Through these multi-year challenge events, our goal has been to focus the research community’s energy toward common platforms and common problems to work toward the greater goal of embodied AI.

Shallow blue

“…The board state interpretation from the vision analysis is passed to the Houdini chess engine (3) to confirm the validity of the detected chess move. Houdini returns confirmation to vision (4), which then either passes the board state to the MCP (5) if the board state was valid, or repeats steps (2)(3)(4) if invalid. Multiple invalid state readings result in a prompt for human input of the correct move.…”

“…Upon move completion, the motion system sends a completion message to the MCP (10). SB then repeats steps (1), (2) and (5) to record a reference image for use in the subsequent move process. The expression channel (A) is utilized to display an onscreen rendering of SB's representation of the current chessboard and to alert the human opponent that SB is ready for the next move.…”

“…Shallow Blue (SB) [1] is an autonomous embodied chessplaying agent initially created for the 2011 AAAI small object manipulation challenge [2]. Design was constrained by three major factors: the rules of the competition, the absence of a significant budget for new hardware, and the relative inexperience of an undergraduate student-led programming team.…”