Social robots compete by interacting with people in a trade show environment

• PITTSBURGH - Grace and George, a pair of socially skilled robots developed by a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the Naval Research Laboratory and Swarthmore College, will participate in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) annual Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition July 27-29, at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, Calif.
• She has an expressive face on a panning platform as well as a large array of sensors.
• The sensors include a microphone, touch sensors, infrared sensors, sonar sensors, a scanning laser range finder, a stereo camera head on a pan-tilt unit, and a single color camera with pan-tilt-zoom capability.
• The robots will work as a team to complete AAAI's Open Interaction Task, which involves interacting with conference attendees in an unstructured environment.
• Grace will "work" at a booth, communicating information about the conference and schedule, while George circulates among the crowd, interacting with people, answering their questions and escorting them to conference locations.
• "We're pushing for a sustained presence by the robots so people can interact with them at their leisure."
• He added that the group chose to participate in Open Interaction Task instead of the Robot challenge because they wanted to showcase the human-robot interaction focus of the Grace and George project.
• At future conferences, Simmons says the team will continue to focus on human-robot interaction, with hopes of developing reliable speech recognition and creating robots that would fill the role of volunteer workers at the conference.
• For more information on Grace and George, see http://www.ri.cmu.edu/projects/project_522.html.
• For more information on AAAI and the Robot Challenge, see http://www.aaai.org.