Jul 17, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. - A team of four Harvey Mudd College students earned top honors at the 20th annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Pittsburgh, Penn., July 9-13. The HMC team (also known as "HMC Hammer") of Susanna Ricco '06, Mac Mason '06, Alan Davidson '06 and Ben Tribelhorn '07 took first place in the robot scavenger hunt competition. Among the entries to this competition, the cost of HMC's robot platform was $600, while the next-lowest-priced platform was $3500. "This underscores the programming and computational efforts of the team," according to their faculty advisor Zachary Dodds, assistant professor of computer science. The HMC team was the only one to successfully retrieve and return one of the scavenger hunt objects (a yellow beach ball). It was also one of the only teams consisting only of undergraduate students. The prize for winning the scavenger hunt was a $2000 Sony AIBO robotic dog. Among the 22 teams entered across the three distinct competitions, the HMC team was awarded the prize for "Overall excellence for a fully autonomous system." The work done by the students was begun last January as part of the elective course Robotics (Computer Science 154). It was continued as a summer research project leading up to the competition. The competition Web site is at:
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