Alfred: The Robot Waiter Who Remembers You

Alfred the robot won first place in the Hors d’Oeuvres Anyone? event and also received an award for the best integrated effort at the 1999 American Association of Artificial Intelligence robot competition. The three unique features that Alfred displayed were: the ability to nudge his way through a crowd to cover a large serving area, a strong personality--that of a proper British butler, and the ability to recognize people he had served before. This paper describes the integrated navigation, natural language processing, and vision system that enabled these capabilities.