Robotics Challenge Teams to Compete for $2 Million Top Prize
Team TRACLab’s Atlas robot competes in the 2013 Robotics Challenge trial. Photo: DARPA.
Germany’s Team NimbRo Rescue’s robot, Momaro, completes its qualifying tasks for the competition.
Twenty five teams from Germany, Japan, South Korea China, Hong Kong, Italy and the United States have qualified to compete for the $2 million top prize in the finals of DARPA’s Robotics Challenge, slated for June 5-6 in Pomona, California.
The challenge is intended to lead to robotics technology that could be used in the wake of disasters. The competing robots are mostly humanoid, as the robots will need to move through buildings and other areas that are designed to accommodate humans. They will also have to deal with communications that are degraded or sometimes nonexistent, as they would experience in real life.
The 2013 trials winner, Team Schaft from Japan, had its robotic technology pulled from competition by its owner Google. All the top finalists from the December, 2013 trials are planning to return, including Team IHMC, which placed second, Tartan Rescue, which came in third, and Team MIT, which placed fourth. Other teams, such as Team NimbRo Rescue, were able to join the competition by passing qualification tests.
“I think we’re going to see a whole range of different ways that technology is going to be applied to this problem,” Gill Pratt, DARPA’s program manager for the Robotics Challenge, said in a conference call with reporters on March 5.
As part of the competition, the robots will have to drive a vehicle from a safe zone into a mock disaster area, then walk over rubble, drill through walls and climb stairs to escape, all in one hour. There is also a “surprise manipulation task” that won’t be revealed until the finals, which Pratt said would demonstrate how the teams could think on their feet.
Unlike during the trials, the robots won’t have tethers to provide power or harnesses to hold them up should they fall, which was something that happened frequently in the 2013 session.
“If they do fall down, they’re going to have to get up on their own, so that’s significantly different from what we had before,” Pratt said. “This is the part of the contest that is the most difficult, that has not been done before.”
Some teams are building their own robots and some are using the revamped Atlas robot, developed by Boston Dynamics.
The teams that will compete are:
From Germany — Team Hector, led by Technische Universitat Darmstadt, which will compete with the robot Thormang; Team NimbRo Rescue, led by the University of Bonn, which will compete with Momaro.
From Hong Kong — Team HKU, led by Hong Kong University and Case Western Reserve University, which will compete with an Atlas.
From Italy — Team Walk-Man, led by Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the University of Pisa, which will compete with the robot Walk-Man.
From Japan — Team Aero, led by the University of Tokyo, which will compete with its own robot. Team AIST-NEDO, led by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, which will compete with HRP2+; Team HRP2-Tokyo, led by the University of Tokyo, which will compete with HRP2; Team NEDO-Hydra, led by the University of Tokyo, which will compete with a custom robot; Team NEDO-JSK, led by the University of Tokyo, the Chiba Institute of Technology, Osaka University and Kobe University, which did not list its robot.
From the People’s Republic of China — Team Intelligent Pioneer, led by Hefei Institutes of Physical Science and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which will compete with IP-2.
From South Korea — Team KAIST, led by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which will compete with DRC-Hubo; Team Robotis, led by the company Robotis, which will compete with Thormang 2; Team SNU, led by Seoul National University, which will compete with Thormang.
From the United States — Tartan Rescue, led by Carnegie Mellon University and the National Robotics Engineering Center, which will compete with CHIMP; Team DRC-Hubo, led by the University of Las Vegas, which will compete with DRC-Hubo; Team Grit, led by Grit Robotics, Colorado Mesa University and AutonomouStuff, which will compete with the robot Cog-Burn; Team IHMC Robotics, led by the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, which will use an Atlas named Ian; Team MIT, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which will compete with an Atlas named Helios; Team RoboSimian, led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will compete with RoboSimian; Team Thor, led by the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Pennsylvania, which will compete with Thor-OP; Team TRACLabs, led by TRACLabs Inc., which will compete with an Atlas named Hercules; Team Trooper, led by Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, which will compete with an Atlas; Team Valor, led by Virginia College of Engineering, which will compete with the robot Escher; Team ViGIR, led by TORC Robotics, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Virginia Tech and Oregon State University, which will compete with an Atlas named Florian; and Team WPI-CMU, led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which will compete with an Atlas named Warner.
