![]() The team’s human operators could, for instance, point to an area that might contain a lever, and let the robot plan and execute its own course of action. The team from MIT, for instance, made their Atlas robot, called Helios, capable of acting very autonomously. The teams involved in the competition used differing levels of autonomy. While this encouraged teams to give their machines some autonomy, it was often possible for a human controller to step in when things went wrong. The challenge was designed to simulate the conditions faced by a tele-operated robot entering a nuclear power station, so communications were throttled to simulate radio interference. The robots involved in the event weren’t always acting autonomously (although it was hard for spectators to know when they were). Right: Chimp, a robot from Carnegie Mellon University, does the same. Above: JPL’s Robosimian cuts into a wall using a power tool. T Robot sensors struggle to see shapes accurately in the kind of variable lighting found outside, and robot hands or grippers lack the delicate, compliant touch of human digits. Picking up an electric drill and using it to cut a hole in a wall proved especially challenging for most of the robots. ![]() ![]() The way many robots struggled to grasp objects and use them properly also highlighted the difficulties in perfecting machine vision and manipulation. Several of the teams using Atlas saw their robots come crashing to the ground during the contest. Even so, stability proved difficult for bipedal robots at the DARPA challenge during maneuvers such as walking across sand, striding over piles of rubble, and getting out of a car. ![]() Left: The robot belonging to MIT’s team rides a cart toward the obstacle course.Ībove top: The winning robot, DRC-Hubo from South Korea, prepares to turn a valve.Ītlas can balance dynamically, meaning it can walk at a brisk pace or stay balanced on one leg even when given a push. Other teams brought robots they had built from scratch. Several teams involved in the DARPA Robotics Challenge used Atlas robots to participate. “I think this is an opportunity for everybody to see how hard robotics really is,” says Mark Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, now owned by Google, which produced an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot called Atlas (see “ 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agile Robots”). At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings. Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. A robot operated by a team from the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) keels over while traversing uneven ground.Īt the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see “ A Transformer Wins DARPA’s $2 Million Robotics Challenge”). When some of the world’s most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated.
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