On
Friday & Saturday of last week in Pomona, California was the
final round of DARPA's (defense advanced research and projects
agency) robotic challenge. That final round consisted of 22 robots
made by teams the United States, the European Union, South Korea,
Japan and Hong Kong. Each robot would have to negotiate its way
through an obstacle course were they would carry out 8 tasks. When it
was all over the DRC-HUBO robot built by the KAIST (Korea Advance
Institute of Science and Technology) won the $2 million dollar 1st
place prize by completing all the tasks in 45 minutes.
"Today
was incredible. It was everything we hoped it would be and more,"
Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager in charge of the challenge,
said in a news conference today. But robotics is still in a "young
age," he said.
Second and third place in the
challenge were both won by United States teams. Florida's Institute
of Human and Machine Cognition with The Running Man robot that
completed the course in a still impressive 50 minutes. Not too much
farther behind was team Tartan Rescue's CHIMP robot at just over 55
minutes. For their efforts they won $1 million & $500,000
respectively.
Each of the robots had two
opportunities to complete the course. After the first running on
Friday it was CHIMP that had the fastest time through the course. On
the second day even though CHIMP still made it through in impressive
time both HUBO and The Running Man ramped up their times to take
over first and second place.
The
April 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster it became
apparent that there was a need for a robot that could perform
recovery in areas that were not accessible by humans. So, the call
went out to DARPA to come up with a solution. That solution was a
worldwide
robotics challenge to find a robot that could preform all the
tasks needed in a disaster.
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