Carmel Versus Flakey: A Comparison of Two Winners

Abstract

The University of Michigan's CARMEL and SRI International's FLAKEY were the first- and second-place finishers, respectively, at the 1992 Robot Competition sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The two teams used vastly different approaches in the design of their robots. Many of these differences were for technical reasons, although time constraints, financial resources, and long-term research objectives also played a part. This article gives a technical comparison of CARMEL and FLAKEY, focusing on design issues that were not directly reflected in the scoring criteria.