DARPA Robotics Challenge Opening Doors for Rescue Robotics
CHIMP got knocked down, but it kept getting up again. Photo: AUVSI.
Pomona, California — It’s a good thing the DARPA Robotics Challenge isn’t a beauty contest: The robot that took the top slot on the first day of the competition, Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP, did it the ugly way, but it was the first and only robot to nail every task in the disaster rescue challenge, being held this week here at the Pomona Fairplex.
The 24 teams that attended had to complete eight different tasks — walk or drive a vehicle down a path, get out of the vehicle, open a door and walk through it, turn a valve 360 degrees, pick up a power drill and cut around a black circle on a piece of plywood mounted on the wall, complete a secret task (today, pulling a lever on an electrical box), climb over or remove a pile of rubble and exit through an open doorway, and climb up a set of stairs. Each task is worth one point. In the event of a tie, the time of the run determines a winner.
CHIMP fell hard attempting to go through the first door after exiting the vehicle. Its run seemed over, but after minutes of staying supine, the robot came to and revived its run. It cut a hole around the circle on the plywood wall — albeit in a giant square shape, that veered into the middle of the circle before the robot corrected its drawing. It stumbled about four or five times, creeping its way up the stairs on its tracked arms and legs. But it was still the best robot of the day.
Despite their robot’s sometimes heart-stopping win, Tartan Rescue team members were happy with the result.
The team’s Sean Hyde said he thought it was an “excellent, excellent, run, from getting ourselves free of the truck when we were stuck, and getting ourselves up, the only team all day that managed to get up from a fall, to correcting when the cut was wrong. They did an amazing job recovering.”
He attributed the result to lots of practice.
“Surviving the fall definitely has to do with the robot being sturdy. You can see it’s all beat up,” Hyde said. “We’ve been knocking it over and getting it to stand up … practice, practice, practice.”
Although nine of the teams used DARPA-supplied humanoid Atlas robots, by the end of the first day the non-humanoids ruled the standing. Following the chimp-like CHIMP in the top three was Team NimbRo Rescue’s wheeled cart robot, Momaro, from the University of Bonn, and Team RoboSimian from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with its spider-like RoboSimian.
Having non-human styling did present some problems. Tobias Rodehutskors of team NimbRo Rescue said Momaro had trouble with driving the vehicle and with climbing the stairs, something it didn't attempt on Friday.
The team occupied the top spot of the standings until CHIMP’s amazing turn, and Rodehutskors said his team would probably spend Friday night trying the stair task.
“Maybe we will improve the stairs and we’ll try them tomorrow,” he said.
This weekend’s competition is the third step in the challenge. DARPA held the initial live round of tests in December 2013 in Homestead, Florida. There, the robots had access to power lines and also didn’t have to perform each task sequentially. They were also tethered to keep them from crashing to the ground, something they did frequently at the finals.
Prior to that, DARPA held a simulation challenge for teams, which had to move a virtual Boston Dynamics Atlas robot through a series of tasks.
Nine of the teams at the competition are using the Atlas robot, supplied by DARPA, as their platform of choice.
The first team to do well out of the gate was last competition’s second-place winner, IHMC Robotics, put together by Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Their Atlas robot, Running Man, completed each task in order but took a hard fall when trying to traverse the cinderblock rubble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab opted to design its RoboSimian in house. The four-limbed robot can transform into many shapes and sizes, walking on all four legs, using two of them as legs and the second set as arms, or even rolling into a ball shape. Though it seems complex, JPL kept the mechanics of the design simple by using only one actuator that it repeated 28 times for the limbs. The robot completed seven tasks, though out of order, and the one-hour time to complete all eight finished before it could surmount the stairs.
Members took a 24-hour coding challenge to be eligible to participate, according to team member William Howell. “It doesn’t matter how good you are, but that you are a team player and are willing to learn,” he said.
The crowed cheered on the top robots in sports team fashion, chanting, “Robot! Robot! Robot” or “You can do it!” Howell says the humanoid shape makes the attendees at the Pomona Fairplex racetrack react to the robots.
“It’d be different if these just looked like Bobcats, … if they didn’t look like a thing that people association with themselves.”
At 350 pounds each, the Atlas robots smack hard when they go down. Team ViGIR, made up of universities from around the world and Blacksburg, Virginia’s TORC Robotics has its robot, Florian, outfitted with quarterback-style shoulder pads. The very first robot of the day to get moving, Team HKU from the University of Hong Kong, collapsed immediately. Even the IHMC robot took a loud tumble trying to go over the rubble. Gill Pratt, program manager for the challenge, anticipates teams will take more risks on the second day of the competition, but for tonight the robots have to be preserved for the second round.
The competition was inspired by recent global events.
“We were inspired by the disaster in Fukushima,” said Pratt at a media briefing the day before the competition. For instance, the valve-turning task was taken directly from the incident, where a nuclear reactor was pushed into a meltdown when hydrogen gas was unable to escape through a valve in an area too dangerous to access with humans.
“If only there could have been some way to go in there despite the power being off and operate the emergency equipment they had,” he said.
Communications are degraded the second the robots walk over the first door’s threshold. It can take up to 30 seconds for a signal to reach the robot after that point. Pratt says it is similar to how maxed out and dilapidated communications were after Sept. 11, 2001.
DARPA intentionally created a very difficult competition — “high risk, high reward” is how Pratt defines the agency. And he says making these scenarios reality is a long way off, exactly how self-driving cars a decade ago during DARPA’s Grand and Urban Challenges were not safe yet.
“I would also not trust any of those cars back then to drive me to where I’m trying to go. Why? They are prototypes. They are prototypes with the idea of showing what is possible. … It will still take many years … before the demonstrations that you see here will turn into real products that the public can use.”
The winner of the competition, which will end tomorrow around 7 p.m. PDT, will take home $2 million.
