FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - A 300-pound robotic butler built by University of Arkansas students won awards recently at the eighth annual Mobile Robot Competition in Orlando, Fla.

For the competition, the U of A team designed Elektro, an automated butler that could serve food at a cocktail party.

"It may sound frivolous to create a robot like Rosie from the Jetsons, but this is actually a great research problem," said Douglas Blank, advisor for the team and assistant professor of computer science.

In creating Elektro, the UA students had to design a machine that could speak and understand spoken language, which is still an open problem for artificial intelligence researchers, Blank said.

"Although there are many commercial speech-recognition programs available which allow you to dictate to your word processor, try running those in the middle of a convention center. They just don’t work outside your office cubicle," Blank said.

The UA team’s Elektro won an award for learning to recognize speech during the competition.

"As the competition wore on, our robot was learning to recognize words better, even in the loud convention center," Blank said.

The students programmed Elektro to move around in a crowd of people, find an individual and approach him or her. The robot moves on wheels and contains sensors for determining how close it is to people.

The robot asks the person, in computer-generated English, what color candy he or she wants. Elektro listens to the request, and, through a series of motors and gears, delivers the appropriately colored candy into a cup attached to the robot’s front.

If the robot gets the color wrong, people can give it feedback by pressing a button. This information would, in turn, be used to teach the robot so next time it could perform better.

Elektro was not the only one who learned from experience in Orlando.

"The competition was a lot of work, but also a great learning experience. It allowed us to share ideas with some of the best robotics groups in the country," said Jared Hudson, a U of A sophomore majoring in computer science.

Elektro also won an award in a scavenger hunt, where the robots searched the convention center for various objects. The UA team placed third overall after Kansas State University and the University of North Dakota.

For information on Elektro and the competition, please see:

http://aaai.org/Conferences/National/1999/Robots/aaai99-robots.html

http://brainstem.uark.edu/xrcl

http://dangermouse.uark.edu/~dblank

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