THE 1995 ROBOT COMPETITION AND EXHIBITION

The 1995 Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Montreal, Canada , in conjunction with the 1995 International Joint Conference on Artif icial Intelligence. The competition was designed to demonstrate state- of-the-art autonomous mobile robots, highlighting such tasks as goal-d irected navigation, feature detection, object recognition, identificat ion, and physical manipulation as well as effective human-robot commun ication. The competition consisted of two separate events: (1) Office Delivery and (2) Office Cleanup. The exhibition also consisted of two events: (1) demonstrations of robotics research that was not related t o the contest and (2) robotics focused on aiding people who are mobili ty impaired. There was also a Robotics Forum for technical exchange of information between robotics researchers. Thus, this year's events co vered the gamut of robotics research, from discussions of control stra tegies to demonstrations of useful prototype application systems.