IBM is holding an AI XPrize competition that our school, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is participating in. Details on the competition are found here: http://ai.xprize.org, and information about the vision for the finished product can be found here: https://wordpress.rose-hulman.edu/ai-group/.

In general, the goal is to create a robot capable of responding to natural human interactions for the purposes of manipulating a table filled with blocks. Basically just tell the robot, “Put the green blocks over there,” while pointing, and it should, well, just do that.

This project is intended to allow for the usage of different AI components across different languages and possibly even machines all linked together using UIMA, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture.

The program communicates with the robot using ROS, the robotic operating system, and will be in charge of processing the data sent to it by the robot’s sensors and sending abstract commands for the robot to execute.