Winning the AAAI Robot Competition

Last summer, AAAI sponsored a mobile robot competition in conjunction with the AAAI-92 conference in San Jose, California. Ten robots from across the country competed in the competition, with CARMEL from the University of Michigan finishing first. CARMEL is a Cybermotion K2A mobile platform with a ring of 24 sonar sensors and a single black and white CCD camera. For computing, CARMEL has three processors: one for motor control, one for sonar ring firing and one executing high-level routines such as obstacle avoidance and object recognition. All computation and power is contained entirely on-board.