Booth Bots?

Posted 27 Jul 2004 at 03:49 UTC by steve

Instead of booth babes, geeks at the 2004 AAAI National Conference may be seeing booth bots. Robots particpating in the annual Robot Competition and Exhibition will be required to work in the vendor booths at the convention as part of the contest. The robots will have to register themselves for the conference, find their assigned booth, and interact with human particpants doing things such as escorting them to destinations within meeting hall. Each robot will also have to arrive at a pre-scheduled time and location to present a talk to the humans. A CMU press release says that Grace and George, a pair of social robots developed by researchers at CMU and two other labs, will be working the show.