Sixteen Teams Compete in DARPA Robotics Challenge



   
       
           
       
       
           
       
   

Schaft's robot attempts the door challenge but runs out of time. AUVSI photo.

By Brett Davis



Sixteen teams squared off at a NASCAR track south of Miami for DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Trials 2013, intended to showcase the state of the art for post-disaster rescue robotics.



Japan’s team Schaft took an early lead on the first day, racking up 18 points with their own robots and software. The team brought two robots, named S1 and S2, which showed dexterity and relative speed in the eight tasks the teams had to face.



“They’re a highly focused team,” said Schaft spokesman Sylvia Benavidez. Most of the team, including the founders, came out of the University of Tokyo. “They’ve been a very tight group,” she said.



Schaft held onto that lead throughout the second day, ending up in the top spot.



Second place went to upstate Florida neighbors IHMC, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, which had taken the top place in the earlier Virtual Robotics Competition. It was then able to adapt its software to the DARPA-provided Atlas robot.



Third went to Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Rescue team, with its unique CHIMP robot, which stands for CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform. One of the more unusual robots in the competition, it was, as its name suggests, more chimp like than humanoid, moving on segmented legs that ended in rollers. After lagging on the first day, CHIMP climbed the rankings on day two.



The remaining top eight teams, which will be funded by DARPA to return next year, are MIT, TRACLabs, RoboSimian from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lockheed Martin-led Team Trooper and WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad.



Well over 100 teams had originally vied to take part in the competition and were winnowed down to 16 by a critical design review for some teams and the Virtual Robotics Competition for others, where teams plugged their software into a virtual world to control simulated robots.



DARPA Program Manager Gill Pratt had warned reporters before the competition started that these would not be the running, jumping, fast-moving robots of science fiction films. In fact, he said they would display the speed and dexterity of a one-year-old child.



“You’re not going to see robots racing to the rescue,” he said. “You’re going to see robots coming deliberately to the rescue.”



The robots were attached to cables to hold them up, so that expensive hardware wouldn’t go crashing to the ground if something went wrong. The cables were tested frequently.



Next Year



The goal was to narrow the field of DARPA-backed teams to eight, which would then be able to take part in a competition next year, along with self-funded teams that wanted to return.



Closing out the first day of competition with a final briefing, Brad Tousley, the director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, said the ultimate results of the challenge may be decades off, but it’s a good start.



It could be like the wristwatch, which was the ultimate results of the chronology challenges of the 1700s, he said.



“It’s going to take a long time for this to come to fruition,” he said.