Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
man, whereupon GRACE approached them and asked for directions.
GRACE was able to understand certain simple specific directions, such as
“turn right” and “go forward ten feet”, as well as more general commands
such as “take the elevator to the fourth floor” and “turn right at the next
corner”.
The registration area in the convention center at the AAAI 2002 con-
ference was not on the same floor as the entrance to the building where
GRACE started out, so GRACE had to reach the correct floor by tak-
ing the elevator. GRACE repeatedly asked for directions to the elevator,
until its laser scanner vision system had a good view of an elevator. It
then moved into position in front of the doors and waited for them to
open. Then the robot navigated its way inside and turned around in
readiness for when the elevator reached the desired floor, which it knew
from a human passenger or by a spoken announcement from the eleva-
tor itself. GRACE then waited until its path was clear and moved out
of the elevator. Once GRACE reached the correct floor and found the
sign indicating the registration area, it located the registration desk and
joined the queue.
GRACE waited politely in the registration queue, employing its
knowledge of the concept of personal space to understand when other
delegates were actually in the queue, as opposed to milling around nearby.
GRACE has been taught that people in a queue normally stand close
enough to the person in front of them to signify to others that they are
in the queue, while at the same time keeping an acceptable distance from
the people in front of and behind them.
When GRACE reached the front of the queue its next task was to reg-
ister for the conference. The robot's developers created an interactive sys-
tem sufficiently robust that GRACE could talk to and understand a rel-
atively untrained person. This interface was sufficiently natural that the
registration staff could interact with GRACE well enough for GRACE
to obtain all the various registration paraphernalia (its conference bag, its
badge, a copy of the conference proceedings, etc.) and to discover the
time of its presentation and in which hall the talk was taking place.
After registering for the conference, the robots participating in the
challenge were allowed to use a map to navigate their way around the
building. GRACE used a map that it had built the previous evening and
saved on disk—it had been driven around the convention center while
storing measurements of distances travelled and using this data to build
its map.
