Grace had been billed as a "socially skilled" robot before the Robot Challenge at this week's American Association for Artificial Intelligence meeting in Edmonton, Alberta, but apparently she missed the day at charm school when students were taught not to bump into people in line.
Nudging a judge while waiting in line to register at the conference apparently didn't phase anyone, however. In fact, Grace later won a "human-robot interaction" award.
"Basically, she did everything we wanted to do and did it autonomously," said Reid Simmons, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who led the team from five robot research organizations that assembled the 6-foot-tall robot with a computer monitor face.
"I don't think any of us would have believed a year ago that it would go this smoothly," added Ian Horswell, another team member from Northwestern University.
That's not to say that Grace fulfilled all aspects of the Robot Challenge or that she won the competition, which really isn't a competition at all.
The challenge, established several years ago by the artificial intelligence organization, is to make a robot that can attend the organization's annual conference in the same way a human might -- to arrive at the meeting, find its way to the registration desk, register for the conference, find its way to an assigned lecture hall and present a talk.
Grace -- an acronym for Graduate Robot Attending ConferencE -- did all of that, more or less. Speech recognition was a bit of a problem. Initially, an indoor waterfall at the conference center entrance caused problems -- "It was so noisy that we [humans] couldn't even hear what was going on," Simmons said, prompting the team to ask the management to temporarily shut it off.
At the registration desk, team members had to coach the registration officials about what to say to Grace, because she could understand only certain words in a certain syntax.
It took Grace a bit longer to get to her lecture hall -- 55 minutes from the convention center entrance to the lecture room -- than the team had hoped, but she did it without direct human guidance. Another robot, built by iRobot Corp., completed the same tasks in about 20 minutes, but was teleoperated by a human.
After the challenge Wednesday afternoon, the team -- including members from the Naval Research Laboratory, the TRACLabs division of Metrica Inc., and Swarthmore College -- garnered several prizes for her performance.
Meanwhile, Grace went to pieces -- literally.
"She's in little boxes, in pieces, right now," Simmons said yesterday, as the team prepared to ship her to New York City and a planned appearance Thursday on NBC's "The Today Show."
