The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) has to come a close and the winning robots have been announced.
Designed to save human lives and respond to crisis scenarios, each robot was graded by a point system. For each successfully completed real-world scenario, the robots were awarded a point.
The eight scenarios involved:
- Driving a vehicle through a course within five minutes,
- Exiting the vehicle and walking toward an end zone,
- Opening and travelling through a door,
- Turning a valve 360 degrees,
- Using a cordless drill to cut a predetermined shape out ½ inch thick drywall,
- The manipulation of a surprise item, only revealed to the team at the day of the event,
- Walking through a field of debris or rough terrain and
- Ascending a flight of stairs.
Each scenario led fluidly into the next and a final time count was included in the robot’s assessments.
Humanoid in shape, Hubo scored its team a full eight points within a record time 44 minutes and 28 seconds. Team Kaist received $2 million in prize money for their robot’s speed and precision, outperforming second place by six minutes.
Watch Hubo ascend the steps to victory in the final segment of its challenge below.
Second place was given to Running Man, designed by Team IHMC Robotics, Pensacola, FL.
IHMC claimed a winnings of $1 million in prize money, after their robot scored eight points with a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds.
Third place decidedly belonged to CHIMP, designed by Tartan Rescue, from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
More apelike than the humanoid designs in first and second place, CHIMP was the only other robot to score the full eight points, completing the challenge in 55 minutes and 15 seconds. Tartan Rescue won $500,000 in prize money.
“This is the end of the DRC, but only the beginning of a future in which robots can work alongside people to reduce the toll of disasters,” said DARPA director Arati Prabhakar. “I am so proud of all the teams that participated and know that the community that the DRC has helped to catalyze will do great things in the years ahead.”
For more information on the DARPA Robotics Challenge and the teams involved, read below and visit theroboticschallenge.org.
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May 25, 2015
The finals for the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) are fast approaching. It’s now down to 25 teams to determine who can engineer the most effective emergency response robot for man-made and natural disasters.
To qualify for the DRC Finals, teams had to submit videos showing the successful completion of five tasks:
- Engage an emergency shut-off switch,
- Get up from a prone position,
- Locomote 10 meters without falling,
- Pass over a barrier and
- Rotate a circular valve 360 degrees.
A Look at the Robots
Atlas is one of the many qualifying robots. Humanoid in shape, it stands at 6 feet and 2 inches tall, weighing 345 pounds.
The team of MIT students behind Atlas command the robot remotely to complete tasks that could be encountered in a real-life rescue situation.
To meet the entry requirements for the DRC Finals, Atlas was recorded opening a door, walking through it, turning to and approaching a wheel attached to a plywood frame. As if opening a valve, Atlas turned the wheel with his three fingered hand.Originally built by Boston Dynamics, Atlas’ design still requires fine tuning, however, still falling over from time to time.
“If a robot falls, and we imagine that a large number of them will, it will face the danger of being injured, and perhaps not being able to continue. If it does fall, it will have to get up on its own,” Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager for the challenge, told reporters during a briefing last week.
Despite the occasional missteps, the team behind Atlas is hopeful. “This is the most advanced, sophisticated machine I’ve ever worked on,” said Russ Tedrake, the professor who leads the MIT team.
Sophistication is exactly what the 25 international teams will need to succeed, as falling over isn’t the only challenge they can expect to face.
“We’re looking forward to seeing how the teams ensure the robustness of their robots against falls, strategically manage battery power and build enough partial autonomy into the robots to complete the challenge tasks despite DARPA deliberately degrading the communication links between robots and operators,” says Pratt.
Learning from the Fukushima Incident
After the devastating explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the limitations of emergency response robots were made obvious, leaving humans to do the most hazardous work, notes Scientific American.
Robots from iRobot and Honeywell, developed using DARPA funds were present at the Fukushima cleanup. It was the passing of this event that led to the inspiration for the DRC, as without robotic assistance many more lives could have been lost. "Without [the 510] Packbot, the cool shut down of the plant would have been impossible," said Satoshi Tadokoro, professor at Tohoku University and president of the International Rescue System Institute.
“Fukushima was really a great inspiration for us because we don’t know what the next disaster is going to be,” said Pratt in conversation with Scientific American. “But we know that we have to develop technology to help us to address these kinds of disasters.”
The DRC Finals will take place June 5-6, 2015, at Fairplex in Pomona, CA, outside of Los Angeles.
For more information on the DRC, visit darpa.mil.
For more information on the Atlas robot and the MIT team, visit drc.mit.edu.
All images courtesy John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe