NASA’s “Valkyrie” robot is 6 feet tall and weighs 290 pounds. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory will test and develop the bot for future space missions. Photo: NASA

By Adam Conner-Simons, MIT CSAIL

NASA announced yesterday that MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is one of two university research groups nationwide that will receive a 6-foot, 290-pound humanoid robot to test and develop for future space missions to Mars and beyond.

A group led by CSAIL principal investigator Russ Tedrake will develop algorithms for the robot, known as “Valkyrie” or “R5,” as part of NASA’s upcoming Space Robotics Challenge, which aims to create more dexterous autonomous robots that can help or even take the place of humans “extreme space” missions. (NASA’s challenge is divided into a virtual competition using robotic simulations, and a physical competition using the robot.)

Tedrake’s team, which was selected from groups that were entered in this year’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, will receive as much as $250,000 a year for two years from NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directive.

Exploring deep space by bot

NASA says it is interested in humanoid robots because they can help or even replace astronauts working in extreme space environments. Robots like R5 could be used in future missions either as precursor robots performing mission tasks before humans arrive or as human-assistive robots collaborating with the human crew. While R5 was initially designed to complete disaster-relief maneuvers, its main goal is now to prove itself worthy of even trickier terrain: deep-space exploration.

“Advances in robotics, including human-robotic collaboration, are critical to developing the capabilities required for our journey to Mars,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a NASA press release. “We are excited to engage these university research groups to help NASA with this next big step in robotics technology development.”

Autonomy for autos, robots and more

As head of CSAIL’s Robot Locomotion Group, Tedrake has extensive experience with autonomous robots. Over the past three years he led a team of more than 20 researchers to develop algorithms for a government competition to get another 6-foot-tall humanoid robot named Atlas to open doors, turn valves, drill holes, climb stairs, scramble over cinder blocks, and drive a car — all in the space of one hour.

Tedrake is also part of CSAIL’s new $25 million Toyota-funded research center for autonomous cars, specifically focused on advanced decision-making algorithms and systems that allow vehicles to perceive and navigate their surroundings safely, without human input. The larger collaboration will be coordinated by Gill Pratt PhD ’89, a former MIT professor who most recently served as program director at DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.

In addition to Tedrake’s team at CSAIL, NASA also awarded a R5 robot to a team led by Taskin Padir at Northeastern University.

Last week, the Humanoids 2015 conference was held in Seoul, Korea. It’s the first event to focus on humanoid robots since the Darpa Robotics Challenge (DRC) earlier this year and, in fact, the location is home to the DRC winners, Team KAIST. Hence, it was no surprise that the event was very DRC orientated and even featured a mini-Darpa challenge.

Humanoids is a small conference compared to IROS or ICRA. And I really appreciate that because it gives you the chance to interact more closely with people that actually work in the humanoid field; less people, fewer concurrent sessions and more interaction.

The conference lasted three days, with the first dedicated to workshops and the others to the main conference itself.

I attended the Benchmarking bipedal functions of humanoids robots: towards a unified framework workshop and gave a talk about how to use cloud simulations for benchmarking in a general and unbiased way. Very interesting papers were presented at that workshop, especially about how to build a general framework to benchmark walking in humanoids (by partners in the Koroibot project)

The main conference was divided into plenary talks, paper presentations and interactive sessions. There were guided visits to the laboratories of KIST (the Korean Institute for Science and Technology) and a full demo of the Hubo robot doing all the DRC tests.

I loved the two plenary talks, especially the first one given by Aude Billard from EPFL. She presented a beautiful path of research towards the creation of robots that can do better than humans (super-human competences). She showed her results with the study of a robot that was able to grasp a racket when it was thrown, by making use of dynamical systems. It was impressive to see how her robot was able to grasp rackets and even balls, where a human is not able to do this.

The second plenary talk was given by Russ Tedrake, a DRC participant. He outlined several problems the teams faced when trying to control a robot during the challenge. He demonstrated his quest in trying to exploit the structure of the governing equations of model based control, in order to create more robust control for robot dynamics. I really enjoyed his talk, even if I did not understand it very much.

Paper presentations were limited to ten minutes per publication and I recommend you check the whole list of presented papers here.

The Technical Tours were visits to some the KIST laboratories like the Center for Intelligent Robotics, and the Healthcare Robotics Research Group. The first lab is dedicated to the use of social robots to enhance the cognitive abilities of the elderly. It’s  focused on small humanoids that engage the elderly to play games that stress their cognitive skills. The second lab is more concerned with robots for surgery.

Now, the most impressive activity was the DRC demo. It was amazing to see how the KAIST team performed a complete demo from beginning to end without any trouble. The robot was able to get into the car, drive, get out, open a door, close the valve, perform a drill, walk and finally climb the stairs. And they did this on three consecutive days. Based on my experience at several Robocup competitions, I know how difficult it is to make all this work for a demo, so I cannot say anything but: bravo KAIST!

Evaluating the conference, from my point of view, I feel that it is very (too much) focused on control for humanoids. The vast majority of papers are dedicated to specific control problems that humanoids face and that make them so much more complex than wheeled robots. I, personally, noticed the lack of papers more concerned with cognitive issues, where the fact that the robot is a humanoid might be used to create more complex behaviours.

There could also have been a panel of experts of some sort to analyse the results of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and how a second round of the contest would improve humanoid technology (or not).

Perhaps next year!

In a surprise move today, Toyota held a press conference (see video below) announcing a substantial investment in robotics and AI research to develop “advanced driving support” technology, with former Program Manager of DARPA’s DRC Gill Pratt directing the overall project as Executive Technical Advisor. Toyota will allocate USD$50M over the next five years in a partnership with MIT’s CSAIL (headed by Daniela Rus) and Stanford’s SAIL (headed by Fei-Fei Li) to develop research facilities in Stanford and Cambridge.

Two main themes from the press conference underline the tone of this effort:

First,  Toyota doesn’t refer to autonomous cars but to ‘advanced driving support’ . And this makes sense because, unlike Google (with its fully autonomous car), Toyota’s origins are in car manufacturing and not in software development. Car manufacturers have for some time been introducing ever rising levels of autonomy in their cars and Toyota is following that vector. There are legal advantages to having the driving be ultimately responsible for the car’s movements and therefor any possible accidents; when a vehicle doesn’t respond as expected, a costly product liability suit could follow, as Toyota well knows. Thus what appears at one level to be a more conservative approach to autonomy on the road may in essence be a way to bypass potential legal nightmares and bring autonomous driving technology to the market sooner.

Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota Motor Corporation Senior Managing Officer, repeatedly stated hybrid cars as an example of a specific technology that Toyota pioneered (along with Honda) and brought to market even while it was borderline unprofitable due to its large cost at the time. This offers a possible hint of what may follow.

The second interesting point made clear during Toyota’s Q&A is that this project is only part of the auto manufacturer’s investment in the field. $50M is a lot of money, but for a profitable car maker the size of Toyota, it isn’t much. It looks like Toyota wants to establish a strong presence in the US by collaborating with two of the best research centers in the world (the budget will be equally split between the two universities) … but being a truly global company, it is developing other projects elsewhere as well. It’s worth mentioning that almost all large car manufacturers have similar research projects, and they usually collaborate with research institutes, universities or with each other.

In this respect, Toyota’s decision to bring on Pratt as the project lead appears astute. Pratt’s high visibility role as Program Manager of DARPA’s DRC has left him with significant experience managing and promoting large, big-budget projects, and has provided him with deep connections into US research labs.

You can read Toyota’s press release here for all the details. Automaton has also an excellent coverage of the story (see Toyota Announces Major Push Into AI and Robotics, Wants Cars That Never Crash) and says they will be releasing more in-depth stories about the deal early next week. You can watch the full press conference below:

Team KAIST from Korea won the DARPA Robotics Challenge, held at the Pomona Fairplex in California on June 5th and 6th. KAIST was closely followed by Team IHMC from Florida and CHIMP from CMU. All three teams scored the maximum 8 points in one or other of the two final rounds, where robots had to complete 8 difficult tasks within one hour, including a surprise task. With three teams scoring maximum points, the contest became a race. KAIST was able to complete the whole challenge in only 44 minutes. Source: DARPA.

With this robotics Grand Challenge, DARPA has advanced both the science of robotics and the story. Real robots did useful things, like operate power tools, drive cars and climb stairs far more successfully than we anticipated. But at the same time, the world saw that it was incredibly difficult for them to perform simple human tasks like opening a door. Anyone who is worried about robots stealing their jobs, or killing us in our sleep, can sleep a little sounder tonight.

Most of the world only sees robots in sci-fi movies like Terminator, Chappie and Ex Machina, in out-of-context Youtube videos, or in popular robot combat events, like Battlebots or RoboGames. No wonder real robots are so often a disappointment.

Following the DRC, however, state-of-the art robots stumbling over simple tasks are the new meme.  Rodney Brooks said at the event:

Anyone who is worried about the robot apocalypse just needs to keep their doors closed.

If we were keeping score, then doors definitely beat more robots than any other challenge. Some robots just stared at the door for most of the round. Some fell over trying to open the door. Others managed to open the door, then fell over trying to get through. Some robots (like MIT’s Atlas) actually got a point just by falling out of the car or through the door – because they landed across the designated finish line when they fell. But the robots weren’t just falling over because of the doors. RunningMan, the 2nd place finisher from Team IHMC, fell over while waving to the crowd after successfully completing all eight tasks.

So we can forget the “robot apocalypse”!

Grand Challenges have become a successful tool for accelerating technological progress, operating as financial incentives to solve an issue of global significance. And they have been around for centuries; Napoleon issued several, including the ‘food preservation’ challenge (1795) and the ‘beet sugar’ challenge (1810), in search of ways to feed his army and circumvent port blockades. (The food preservation challenge was won in 1810 by Appert, who invented of canning.)

Gill Pratt, DARPA Program Manager and Robotics Challenge Organizer, expects that the DRC will bring advancements that were 10 to 15 years out into the realm of commercial or successful application. In his words, the DRC will “transform the field of robotics and catapult forward development of robots featuring task-level autonomy that can operate in the hazardous, degraded conditions common in disaster zones.”

In the 2013 DRC trials, only 18 months ago, the 16 qualifying teams were allowed a half hour for each challenge task and could reset the robots between each task. Robots were also tethered to power supplies and in constant communication with robot operators. Only 13 of the 16 teams scored any points; only four teams scored points driving the car; and only three teams scored more than 50% of the points available.

Fast forward to the 2015 finals where 25 teams qualified and 23 competed. Teams had to complete all 8 tasks within one hour, while carrying their power on board. Communications between robots and operators were degraded during much of the challenge to imitate real life disaster conditions. In spite of the big increase in difficulty between trials and finals, 19 teams scored points, 18 attempted the drive and 10 teams scored more than 50% of the available points.

Interestingly, one thing that didn’t change much from trials to finals were the team placings, with half of the top six teams staying in same rank as in 2013. While CMU’s Chimp had a strong lead after Day One, they were unable to repeat their success or improve in rankings and were overtaken by KAIST and IHMC. I’m sure this is much to the chagrin of CMU, who have a history of being pipped after early leads in Grand Challenges.

Another fun fact is that the DRC teams with best performances mostly used ‘transformer’ style non-humanoid robots. RunningMan from IHMC, which used an Atlas, was the exception rather than the rule. KAIST and CMU transformed from bipedal to wheeled or tracked, and CMU’s Chimp was the only robot able to right itself after a fall. RoboSimian used all four limbs and any body orientation it wanted to accomplish tasks, demonstrating that non-humanoid robots are both more successful at operating in human environments and just as capable of pleasing the crowd.

Hattip to EricStout @Goofuth for the IHMC compilation

So the story is out. Robots are ready for the real world, in limited but potentially lifesaving roles. They aren’t superhuman, and they won’t be replacing people any time soon. But they are capable of some useful things and they are fun to watch even if they are falling over instead of fighting.

Who here believed that real robots would make for an interesting spectator sport? I watched the first trials just 18 months ago, and it was like watching paint dry. By contrast, though the crowd at the DRC Finals was very mixed in terms of ‘robot awareness’, we were all captivated, and we gasped and cheered the robots along. As Pratt noted:

These robots are big and made of lots of metal and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety … But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell. And what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered! It’s an extraordinary thing, and I think this is one of the biggest lessons from DRC—the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us, but to help connect people to one another.

DARPA, you set the bar high and all the robot teams delivered! Congratulations to you all!

But let’s lift the bar again at the next Grand Challenge. Teams were claiming that their diverse backgrounds gave them an edge over the competition. But diversity doesn’t just mean competitors from different countries, universities or disciplines. Diversity means many things including seeing more women in robotics. Raise the bar higher again, DARPA. It’s a strategy that obviously works.

Photo credit: Brad Templeton.

This weekend I went to Pomona, CA for the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, where robots (mostly humanoid) competed at a variety of disaster response and assistance tasks. This contest — a successor of sorts to the original DARPA Grand Challenge, which changed the world by giving us robocars — got a fair bit of press, but a lot of it was around this video showing various robots falling down when doing the course …

What you don’t hear in this video are the cries of sympathy from the crowd of thousands watching — akin to when a figure skater might fall down — or the cheers as each robot would complete a simple task to get a point. These cheers and sympathies were not just for the human team members, but in an anthropomorphic way, for the robots themselves. Most of the public reaction to this video included declarations that one need not be too afraid of our future robot overlords just yet. It’s probably better to watch the DARPA official video, which has a little audience reaction.

Don’t be fooled as well by the lesser-known fact that there was a lot of remote human tele-operation involved in the running of the course.

Check out my Gallery of Photos from the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

What you also don’t see in this video is just how very far the robots have come since the first round of trials in December 2013. During those trials the amount of remote human operation was very high, and there weren’t a lot of great fall videos because the robots had tethers that would catch them if they fell. (These robots are heavy and many took serious damage when falling, so almost all testing is done with a crane, hoist or tether to catch the robot during the many falls that occur.)

We aren’t yet anywhere close to having robots that could do tasks like these autonomously, so for now the research is in making robots that can do tasks with more and more autonomy, but with higher level decisions made by remote humans. The tasks in the contest were:

• Starting in a car, drive it down a simple course with a few turns and park it by a door
• Get out of the car — one of the harder tasks as it turns out, and one that demanded a more humanoid form
• Go to a door and open it
• Walk through the door into a room
• In the room, go up to a valve with circular handle and turn it 360 degrees
• Pick up a power drill, and use it to cut a large hole in a sheet of drywall
• Perform a surprise task — throwing a lever on Day One of the challenge, and unplugging a power cord and plugging it into another socket on Day Two.
• Either walk over a field of cinder blocks, or roll through a field of light debris
• Climb a set of stairs

The robots have an hour to do this and so they are often extremely slow, and yet to the surprise of most, the audience — a crowd of thousands and thousands more online — watched with fascination and cheering … even when robots would take a step once a minute, or pause at a task for several minutes, or would get into a problem and spend ten minutes getting fixed by humans as a penalty.  

Four wheels good, two legs bad?

One of the great debates in robotics is whether the humanoid form makes sense. It is popular in fiction, of course, but it’s much harder to attain. It needs to balance, it needs to be able to stand on one foot, it needs to have most of its weight up high, and to really walk like a human, it even needs to balance on its toes. It uses far more energy to travel and is slower. Legs can handle many more types of terrain, though four-legged robots like BigDog seem able to do more. Rolling is vastly easier and more efficient, but it can’t be done in as many places — though tracked rollers are able to cover fairly rough terrain and even climb stairs.

A number of the robots in this contest took a hybrid approach. They were roughly humanoid (or simian) but had tracks or wheels on their feet and sometimes their hands or knees. This allowed them to switch to a 4-wheeled mode when moving on a flat surface for any distance. This made them much faster, particularly because any walking for now is quite slow due to the risk of falling.

Strangely, the wheeled robots had an advantage in the debris task. While they could not use the wheels to go over the cinder blocks in most cases, the alternative — the field of debris — turned out to have debris that was so light that the big heavy wheeled robots could just bulldoze through it, pushing the debris aside (though one robot did get a wheel caught). In theory, the contest was supposed to involve the robots using their arms to clear the debris. The winning team even complained this was too easy, because they had worked on doing the harder task but would have been crazy to waste time doing it.

Most of the top teams, except the 2nd place IHMC crew, used wheels in some way. Of course, one thing that strongly discouraged wheels was the fact that DARPA helped several teams by providing them with an Atlas humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics (makers of BigDog et al.) The Atlas robot, which would have cost a fortune to make, gave teams the ability focus on software and worry less about hardware, but it also constrained what they did. The winning team from Korea (KAIST) had their own hardware division to make their own robot, as did a few other teams. Some teams collaborated on making the hardware platform. Building a custom robot is so expensive that it makes a great deal of sense to share — it’s so expensive, in fact, that even if you won the $2 million prize, you would still likely lose money building your own robot.

The fastest robot on Day 1, Nimbro, had four combination wheel/legs and was very non-humanoid. Watch this time-lapse:

A few of the top robots had fairly non-humanoid forms. The 3rd place Tartan Rescue robot named Chimp, as well as the 5th place Robosimian from JPL had more ape-like forms, walking or rolling on four legs, and doing that to climb the stairs and get out of the car. There was even some argument that we should not try to make our robots too humanoid, because that makes people see them as human replacements, rather than as tools.

Remote operation and autonomy

It will disappoint many to learn that there was still lots of human involvement in the running of the course. These robots had the autonomy to do very basic tasks, like walking or rolling, or rotating an arm, or grasping, but all high level decisions were done by a team in a garage on the other side of the fairgrounds. They could not see the video feed, and to force them to make their robots more autonomous, their data connections to the robots were deliberately seriously degraded once they opened the door and went into the room. At that point they were reduced to a 9600 bps feed, plus 1 second bursts and random every 30 seconds of the high speed feed. This meant it was not possible, as some had tried in the trials, to use them more like radio controlled waldo devices.

What happened varied from team to team and task to task. In most cases though, teams would look at the high-res images and 3D scans that would come from the short bursts, and then tell the robot to move to a certain spot or put their hand in a given spot. They would then wait up to 30 seconds to get another burst and figure out what to do. Some robots were much better. For example, in the wall drilling task, some robots, once told where to cut the circle, could do that on their own.

Most of the delays that made the progress so slow involved this loop back to the humans. As the contests progress, and there is more autonomy, the robots will get faster and more interesting to watch. I think even the 9600bps channel is too much for real applications, because it was (mostly) up all the time. Some teams were able to think back to the days when we considered 9600bps fast and build interfaces that worked with that. Others seemed to live and die by the short high-speed (300mbps) bursts.

To make all this happen, they used network stressing equipment to create the degraded connections, but they also banned all 5ghz wifi at the event to make sure that they only got artificial problems with the network, not real ones. To screw them up, they also dropped packets and delivered them out of order.

Once again, the message is not to be too disappointed in the amount of remote control, but look at the trend, and how much less remote control was needed in the finals, just 18 months after the trials. Likewise consider the move from needing a tether due to constant falling to having to move on their own, with serious risks from falling. One robot that fell broke a fluid line and was out of competition. On the other hand, the 3rd place Tartan Rescue team from CMU actually had their four-legged CHIMP get up after a fall, avoiding the 10 minute reset penalty — they were the only team to get all 8 points on Day One.

This article originally appeared on robocars.com. 

Robohub’s Andra Keay @svrobo is onsite at the DRC Finals to keep you posted. 

#DARPADRC Tweets

Check out all our DRC coverage, including these top stories:

• DARPA’s Robotics Challenge: A pocket-sized guide to the finals
• DRC is not just about building robots; it’s about building community
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

The DARPA Robotic Challenge Finals at the Pomona Fairgrounds is a far bigger event than I imagined. Four sets like this one plus a stage, a grandstand full of people and an exposition hall with 80+ exhibitors!

If you study the picture (click to enlarge) you can see the whole process that each of the 24 participating teams must go through:

• The robot gets loaded into the drivers seat of an AGV under the white awning. It then drives itself down an obstacle course to the red door at the bottom right of the picture.
• Then the robot dismounts the vehicle and opens and goes through the red door.
• Then it moves past some electrical panels and finds a valve which it must turn sufficient to close it.
• It then moves over to the black circle and chooses a tool or tools from the shelf to carve out a hole in the drywall.
• It then returns the tools to the shelf and walks or climbs over the rubble through the doorway to the stairs.
• And the final task is to climb the stairs.
• If it’s able to do each task all within an hour it gets a lot of points.
• The three teams with the highest point counts get the big bucks: $2 million; $1 million and $500,000.

It all starts Friday at 8 am at the Pomona Fairgrounds.

This is a big story with implications well beyond the contest aspects. I’ll be writing about it over the next few days. This is just a teaser as to what it’s all about.

Source: DRC Blog.

The DRC is all about pushing robotics technology forward. It’s all about creating a community devoted to innovation. And as it comes down to the finale on Friday and Saturday, it will also be about theatre. When spectators take their seats in the Grandstands at the Fairplex on Friday and Saturday, they will see a quartet of virtually identical Finals Courses, or what Kathy Wadham, director of creative programming for Fairplex, thinks of as stage sets. “Anything that needs to be turned into something else, or created here, we do that,” said Wadham during a backstage tour of the concocted disaster zones the robots will have to navigate over and through.

Momentum toward these DRC finals-courses/stage-sets began picking up several months ago when DRC organizers met with Wadham to explain how the courses had to be laid out, so four robots could test their humanitarian assistance skills in parallel. “They said, ‘We have a vision, can you do it?’” Wadham recalled. Those initial meetings led to detailed specifications and drawings and then it was up to Wadham to translate those abstractions into four essentially identical sets that would put the most sophisticated humanoid robots on the planet through some of the most challenging tests they have ever faced.

“I didn’t want it to look cartoonish,” Wadham said. “I wanted it to look real.” And that explains why she had an aha! moment one day as she was doing some rounds on the grounds beyond the Grandstands. She looked up at the roofs of the old horse barns on the premises and she knew she had found the perfect material for the walls of her DRC sets—corrugated tin that had been aging and rusting for 40 years. It was a fitting artistic epiphany, given that the DRC is the Triple Crown of robotics.

Source: DRC Blog.

“We went through our scrap piles to find the doors and the electrical switches,” she said. Those same piles were a gold mine for creating the debris fields in front of the steel staircases on the left side of each set. Each junk heap is an assemblage of rooftop turbine vents (some with long-abandoned birds’ nests inside), gas line piping, beat up steel drums, water heater vessels, and sundry other pieces of detritus. “Some of the stuff was not rusted enough at first,” she said. “So we have a person who rusts and weathers it and makes it look old.”

For some of the details on the set, Walham went shopping. She found the incandescent bulbs for the dingy metal mesh fixtures online and purchased decals of gauges for the square electrical cabinets from a store specializing in retro design.

“We create places,” says Wadham. “That’s what we do.” The precisely dilapidated settings Walham and her Fairplex coworkers ultimately built—each with somewhat different piles of rubble strewn around the periphery but by necessity identical in the areas where the competing robots must traverse—are sure to transport DRC spectators to the earthquake, tsunami or hazerdous industrial zones in which we all hope robots will one day provide life-saving assistance.

Robotica Comedia

Human beings rarely squander an opportunity for comedy. That tendency is holding true in Building Nine of the Fairplex in Pomona, where the DRC teams are preparing their robots for the big race days on Friday and Saturday.

Team THOR members couldn’t stop themselves from adding a doll head and some tattoo sleeves, not to mention a little UCLA bling, to their THOR-RD robot. Source: DRC Blog.

Team VALOR didn’t forget to pack a garden gnome—for a test bed they set up in their garage bay—along with a grab bag of props for their robot ESCHER. Source: DRC Blog.

One more thing: a baby shoe on a stick, here in the hands of team member and graduate student John Seminatore, has proven to be a useful and gentle engineering tool for prodding ESHER’s joints. Source: DRC Blog.

Team Grit makes a Western fashion statement atop its quadruped robot, Cog-Burn. Source: DRC Blog.

Team TRACLabs — at Homestead-Miami Speedway [photo: DARPA facebook page]

Something remarkable is happening in Building 9 here at the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif. Imagine a long, giant warehouse-like building divided into 24 bays, within which people from around the world are unpacking their robots and preparing them for the DRC Finals. Imagine lids being pried off the tops of reinforced wooden crates, foam padding and stuffing peanuts being brushed aside, and then slowly—with the help of gantries and winches—metallic creatures rising from their shipping crypts like mummies exhumed not from the past but from a future.

That’s the technical part—the fork lifts, the tools, the LEDs blinking to life as members of this new generation of increasingly sure-footed emergency responders prepare for the difficulties that await them on the challenge course outside. But the even more remarkable part is the human half of this evolving experiment in human-robotic collaboration. Members of competing teams are visiting each other. They are sharing tips and even software. Yesterday, two teams in adjoining bays wanted to know if they could lower the eight-foot-tall privacy wall that separated them so they could work together better. In less than a day, a community has arisen.

That’s a great reminder that the DRC is not about robots going off to mitigate disasters on their own. It’s about honing the interface between humans and robots, so we can take best advantage of what each has to offer. Hundreds of people are coalescing around a common goal that demands the best of people and their machines. I could not be more inspired.

Now, as the momentum builds, it’s time for me to focus on the final details of the Finals event itself, so I will take a break from updating this page personally. But please check out DRC’s new blog page—Post Cards from DRC—which will be updated regularly over the next several days to immerse you in the excitement, the tension, the people … and yes, the robots of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• DARPA’s Robotics Challenge: A pocket-sized guide to the finals
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing
• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Illustration: James Provost & Erik Vrielink. Source: Automaton Blog.

DARPA’s latest Challenge reaches its climax on 6 June 2015, when 25 finalists compete for $3.5m of prize money in what’s possibly the most anticipated robotic contest ever. Since its inception in 2012, the event has lost its top competitor and the challenge is now even tougher. Here’s what you need to know to enjoy the event, in one handy guide.

The purpose 

In the past three years, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested $96.6m in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) – a hugely ambitious program to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.

The DRC was inspired by the Fukushima disaster, and the US Department of Defense identifies disaster response as a priority area. In DARPA’s most recent briefing in mid-May, Programme Manager Gill Pratt broadly described the contest’s aims: “We really want to develop better tools, better techniques, ways of amplifying the effectiveness of our response to both natural and to manmade disasters.”

“If we could only better intervene from a distance in places where it’s too dangerous for human life, that would significantly add to our capabilities to mitigate the extent of disasters. That’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.”

In a disaster, one of the most problematic elements is a degradation of communication, and Pratt stressed that this is the most important aspect of the competition: “When you think about the DARPA Robotics Challenge, try to think beyond the physical robots, and focus on this very sporadic, very degraded communication between people and machines working together as partners.”

Why humanoids?

CHIMP. Source: Carnegie Mellon

According to DARPA’s research with first-response experts, the key capability requirements point to a humanoid solution – the ability to go through doors, climb steep stairs, walk on rough terrain and to use the tools on hand – are all only really achievable by a humanoid robot.

So most of the robots have bipedal designs and are humanoid in appearance, with a couple of exceptions: Tartan Rescue‘s Chimp (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform), the long armed robot that finished third in the 2013 Trials, and NASA’s RoboSimian, which has four limbs for increased stability. There’s also Team NimbRo Rescue, which has a anthropomorphic upper body on a flexible hybrid mobile base.

Human-robot interfaces must be intuitive and simplicity of use is also a primary reason why so many of the teams use bipedal, human-like forms, including DARPA’s Atlas robot model.

The challenge

This will be the final challenge in a long process that started with a virtual event in 2013 and a physical trial run later that year. Through these two preliminary rounds of competition, DARPA and the DRC teams have redefined what is possible in robot power efficiency, supervised autonomy, physical adaptability and human-machine control interfaces.

The final challenge takes place in a simulated disaster zone. It will involve two attempts at eight tasks; seven of these will be derived from the challenges of the last round, and one surprise task will be introduced at the competition.

The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they’ll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they’ll have to climb a flight of stairs. The fastest team with the same amount of points for completing tasks will win.

The main issues teams will face are communications with their robot and battery life: “Even the best batteries are still roughly ten times less energy-dense than the kinds of fuels we all use to get around,” said Pratt.

What’s happened since the last phase?

The Programme has been extended and is now truly international. Half of the teams are from the US, but Japan, Korea and the EU have invested funds. Says Pratt: “It’s a really global challenge.” 

SCHAFT

The biggest change is, however, the withdrawal of Team SCHAFT, head-and-shoulders winners of the last phase of the challenge. SCHAFT, developed by a Japanese start-up, was acquired by Google in December. Their withdrawal last June underlines both Google’s claims that it has no interest in seeking funding from the military, and the US government’s need to not be seen as funding a major corporation.

The new emphasis on the communications aspect of the challenge means DARPA will be purposefully sabotaging the link between teams and their robots. During the Fukushima nuclear disaster, it was communication issues caused by heavy radiation shielding and power outages that proved most problematic for the robots tasked with entering the site. The DRC communication outages will last up to one minute to test how well these robots deal with similar situations.

The teams are provided with situation awareness to help them visualise what the robots are up to. A change in the rules forces teams to rely less upon the remote control of individual joints and motions and instead implement task-based interfaces that incorporate advanced perception, minimal human guidance, and complex autonomous behaviour.

DARPA has also decided that the robots will operate completely untethered. There won’t be cables to provide power and data, or keep the robots upright. In view of this, DARPA has swapped the ladders used in the last challenge for stairs, making it a little easier.

The Atlas robot, created by Bostron Dynamics and DARPA, was used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

The ATLAS robot, used by the seven teams that are concentrating on software instead of hardware, has had an upgrade.The platform is manufactured by Boston Dynamics – another company recently acquired by Google.

Among the improvements to ATLAS is increased energy efficiency, with some teams now able to achieve several hours of functionality without the need for a recharge.

“We’ve provided these new robots with a very large, high-performance computer now, at least for the Atlas machines,” says Pratt. “But primarily what the robot is doing is perception, and I think that’s actually the hardest part of the job that it has. So it’s using the LiDAR sensors and the visual sensors that it has and it’s trying to decide what it is that it sees.”

DARPA is being fairly secretive about the specifics of the tasks the robots must perform: “We’ve been very purposefully not giving blueprints out to any of the teams to say this is exactly what the door handle will be like or what the valve will be like,” says Pratt. “I want to push the teams far away from trying to have scripted responses.”

The teams

There will be 25 teams competing in total, half of them from the United States. Japan, Korea and Germany are well represented with a total of 10 teams between them.

Out of the 25, a total of 14 new teams from seven different countries have been added, qualifying to participate in the DRC Finals. And 11 teams previously qualified during the DRC Trials.

Seven teams are using Atlas and the other teams have developed their own robots, which come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

Speaking about the differing capabilities of the teams, Pratt said: “We don’t know exactly what all the teams are bringing to bear, but I would expect tremendous diversity in the amount of autonomy that you’re going to see there. In addition, there’s also a variety of different user interfaces. The most primitive one just leaves it to the human being to use their brain to do the imagination of what is taking place on the other side. The best of them is actually gathering all of the data since the beginning of the run and putting together a statistical view of what the most likely scenario is at the other side.”

Team KAIST. Source: DARPA

Teams tipped for top spots include: KAIST, from South Korea and US challenger, Chimp.

What you can expect: 

The robots will compete simultaneously across four courses during hour-long runs throughout the two days.

At the DRC Trials held last December, the robots often moved excruciatingly slowly and depended upon the careful control of remote human operators. At the June final, the robots will be “at least four times faster than in the trials, and perhaps even faster,” says Pratt.

However, some would disagree, in The NY Times, John Markoff writes:

“Nobody needs to worry about a Terminator creating havoc anytime soon. Given a year and a half to improve their machines, the roboticists who shared details about their work in interviews before the contest in June appear to have made limited progress.”

However, in the December trials, organisers thought it unlikely that the winning team could score more than 15 points, but four teams exceeded that number and SCHAFT won a total of 27. So expect the unexpected!

In the trials, driving appeared to be a particular challenge, with only a few contenders even attempting it. In the DRC Finals, driving will be the first task that teams will have to tackle. “With the driving challenge coming first before anything else, we will see immediately who is serious about the competition,” says Andra Keay from Silicon Valley Robotics. “It’s a big fence first up.”

Adequate power will also present a problem. DARPA are not allowing any recharging of the robots during the event. In fact, Pratt warned reporters that the challenges in June will be even harder and told them that the “degradation of communications is a fundamental part.”

Artist’s concept of robots competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Source: DARPA

The planned interruptions in communications will mean that, “a substantial fraction of the teams will have difficulties here.” Although, whenever the robots do have a network connection, they’ll have significantly more computing resources than were available in the last round.

The teams have had to move a lot of the low-level mobility and manipulation skills from the human operators to the machines; the robots will need enough autonomy and intelligence to do tasks in a fraction of a minute. “You should expect to see a lot of robots falling down, and a lot failures of different sorts,” said Pratt.

This is largely due to the planned communications failures and the lack of hoists or safety ropes. If a team becomes stuck and the robot can’t get up, they can elect to take a 10-minute penalty during which a simulation is made of what it would be like to send in a second robot in to continue the mission after the first one has got stuck. “The simulation of that will be done by the team retrieving the first robot, bringing it back to the starting line, and, if it’s still in working condition, starting it over with a 10-minute penalty,” said Pratt.

It seems the DRC finalists are currently still at task level rather than mission level.

“I want to be very realistic about what stage we’re in right now,” said Pratt. “These are prototypes that are meant to advance the technology and it might be 10 years from now until they’re out in the field. There’s a huge difference between science fact and science fiction. Robots in science fact are more modest because the technology isn’t anywhere near what science fiction would have us believe – but they’re also more exciting because they point the way to what may be possible in the future.”

Want to go, or just watch?

The event is free and open to the public, who will watch from the Fairplex grandstands in Pomona, California on 5 and 6 June; several thousand people are expected to attend. To complement the competition, an on-site robotics exhibition and technology demonstrations from around 70 different robotics and disaster response groups is planned. All kinds of robotics hardware and software companies will be exhibiting. To attend the event, you only need to register: http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/media.

The whole Finals event will be webcast in realtime HD on YouTube. The best time to watch will be towards the end of each competition day, as that’s when the finest of the machines will be directly competing with each other, each on their own course.

What happens afterwards

The closing ceremony on 6 June will be be followed by a workshop on 7 June. The three winning teams will present the strategies and techniques that they used to gain the top spots. This won’t be open to the public, but it will be webcast.

There will also be talks about the international efforts in the field, other competitions that are coming up in the future, the different investments that are being made in various countries. Experts will also discuss the future of the industry.

Part of the day will be given over to “Robots 4us” – a DARPA competition for high school students who were given the opportunity to produce a winning video on the role of robots in society in the years ahead.

DARPA sees the DRC as an opportunity to lay the technological foundations for more autonomous and capable robots in the commercial market. In fact, the success of the competition lies in part in the commercial investments in robotics that it inspires. To this end, DARPA and some of the teams plan to publish their experiences academically.

And Atlas? What of him? The simple answer is that the DRC organisers have not yet reached a decision about Atlas’ future.

Could we see some of the resulting technology put to military use? “The key answer is that the technology is by its nature generic,” said Pratt. “It could be used in future systems for defense, or it could be used in a number of fields, like healthcare.”

Why it’s important

In short, the stellar progress we’ve seen in driverless cars in the last decade owes everything to DARPA’s 2004 Autonomous Vehicle Grand Challenge.

The sale of the DRC Trials favourite SCHAFT and Atlas software manufacturers Boston Dynamics to Google would suggest history repeating itself.

The DRC has also helped in the development of tools; the organisers funded the development of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) simulator, which was first used in the virtual challenge.

It can also take some of the credit for the amount of investment the robotics industry has seen lately. Says Pratt: “DARPA’s job is to show what’s possible. We do those early investments… and the best case is that the private sector picks that up.”

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids
• DARPA’s legacy: Open source simulation for robotics development and testing
• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Traveling from dozens of locations around the world, the teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge have begun unloading their precious cargo into their respective working bays inside the cavernous Building 9 on the Fairplex site in Pomona, CA. Each team has pulled off its own logistics miracle to pack up not only their robots but also huge chunks of their home laboratories into a truck’s-worth of boxes and crates. Today they are reassembling these small mountains of tech gear into 24 sophisticated pop-up robotics laboratories. One member with Team Hector, coming all the way from the Technische Universitat in Darmstadt, Germany, said there was almost nothing left in the lab back home.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Already at breakfast time, Building 9 was filled with the sounds of construction: a fleet of student-pulled dollies bearing robot parts and tools, fork lifts with sturdy crates, and massive, beeping materials-handling vehicles delivering cinder blocks and wooden frameworks that some teams will use to build replicas of the emergency-response tasks their robots will face later in the week. Now and again, team members rolled in a robot hanging on an aluminum framework—for now, looking like inanimate futuristic manikins—as other robots sat frozen, their arms and hands up in front of their faces like boxers in a defensive position.

Already apparent in Building 9 are signs of collaboration among teams and an eager comparing of notes. But apparent also was a rising competitive energy as teams were able to peer into each other’s pop-up laboratories and get first glimpses of their robot rivals. And already on everyone’s mind is which robots and which teams will come out on top.

Who wouldn’t love a win, place or show, and the respective take-home prizes of $2 million, $1 million and $500,000? But the far more valuable result of the entire DRC, noted DARPA program manager Gill Pratt during a welcome session on Sunday evening, transcends the specific outcome of the competition. The priceless payoff, really already in hand, is the community of researchers the DRC has catalyzed into existence with the collective goal of pushing robotic technology forward.

To come later from the DRC, Pratt and other participants expect, are robots that can open a pressure-relief valve to prevent a disastrous explosion in a nuclear power plant or disarm improvised explosive devices on battlefields. But as spectators will witness on Friday and Saturday, getting there will be a one-step-at-a-time journey.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

Teams start arriving to set-up their garages in preparation for the Robotics Competition. Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It takes place at Fairplex (home of the LA County Fair) in Pomona, California, just east of downtown Los Angeles.

As a first step, we designed the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC). The VRC enabled us to invite software developers, who may not otherwise have access to robotics hardware, to participate in the DRC program. DARPA would provide robots to the teams that brought the best software to control them.

In June 2013, 26 teams competed in the VRC. The competition took place exclusively in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Simulator—also known as Gazebo—an open-source, cloud-based platform. Teams competed in this virtual environment from the perspective of a robot’s onboard sensors within a 3-D virtual environment that displayed the robot sensor data in real time. The top six teams moved on to participate in the DRC Trials using an ATLAS robot.  All of these teams are now moving on to compete in the DRC Finals this June.

You can read about the details of OSRF’s role in the Virtual Robotics Challenge or watch a short video here (link is external), but more generally, what I find most impressive about the simulator is how far the technology has come in such a short time, and how quickly it has been adopted throughout the robotics industry. Since the VRC, DARPA has continued to fund OSRF to evolve the simulator to improve simulation accuracy, usability, and a range of features. As of early last year, Gazebo became the first simulator to support four different physics engines (link is external). Each engine provides a unique set of capabilities, and provides users the ability to customize simulation to an unprecedented degree. Many of the DRC finalists continue to use Gazebo as part of their preparation for the upcoming competition.

Additional planned enhancements to Gazebo over the next few months will include Windows support, aerodynamics simulation, improved performance, and more realistic rendering.

OSRF has also expanded the types of virtual environments available. Digital elevation models are fully supported, allowing for simulation of real-world terrain or fictitious landscapes. An in-simulation building editor facilitates the construction of custom multi-story structures. Finally, a new graphical model editor simplifies the process of creating and editing robot and other simulation objects.

Use of Gazebo is now common among robotics professionals working in the areas of service and industrial robots, academics, training and more. It is also being used in DARPA’s HAPTIX program, which is seeking to create an advanced prosthetic hand system that moves and provides sensation like a natural hand.

Even after the DRC is over, the DARPA-funded Gazebo (link is external)
simulation software will continue to be available to future robotics innovators.

Five short videos prepared by U.S. high school students have been selected as winning entries in DARPA’s “Robots4Us” video contest and will be featured at a June 7 invitational workshop on the future of robotics. DARPA launched the contest to stimulate student consideration of the societal implications of robotics.

Winners created compelling short videos about the future of robots in society and will get the chance to discuss their ideas and see current cutting-edge robots in action.

The student winners, whose videos look ahead to a future when robots will play ever more important roles in fields ranging from agriculture to medicine to emergency response, will travel as DARPA’s guests to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, to be held in Pomona, Calif., on June 5 and 6. There, state-of-the-art robots prepared by more than 20 top robotics organizations from around the world will compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt to complete humanitarian assistance tasks on a simulated disaster-response course.

The next day, the student winners will participate in a day-long DARPA workshop in Pomona, “From Better Robots to Better Futures.” That event will feature lessons learned by the top three DRC teams, announcements of future international robotics challenges and activities, and visions offered by industry and government leaders about the ways in which robots may become integrated into society in the future. The student winners will participate in a panel discussion about their videos and offer their visions and perspectives on issues to consider. The workshop will be webcast on DARPA’s YouTube page, where the Robots4Us winning videos—approximately three minutes each—will debut that day.

“DARPA wanted to hear from the generation that will be the first to grow up and live with a wide range of robotics technologies. Their ideas about how robots might make a difference for society will shape that future,” said DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar. “We appreciate the thought these students put into their creations. And we were inspired by their visions about the influence robotics could have in our businesses, our homes, and in the military.”

Robots4Us contest student winners are:

• Kristina Argao, Hagatna, Guam (Teammate: Riezzalyn Viray)
• Ben Chrepta, Rochester, Minn. (Teammate: Alden Giedraitis)
• Hector Cruz, Cedar City, Utah
• Shiloh Curtis, Santa Cruz, Calif.
• Atticus Jones, New York, N.Y. (Teammates: Kentaro Jones and Jigme Tinley)

A panel of judges with expertise in robotics technology, videography, science communication, and social and ethical issues evaluated the video submissions. The judges based their scores on how clearly each entrant communicated his or her vision of the future; creativity, thoughtfulness, originality and appeal; and technical quality.

Stay tuned in here to learn more about the Robots4Us contest and the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and to view the student-developed videos and watch the live webcast of the “Better Robots: Better Futures” workshop on June 7. More detail about DARPA’s goals for the Robots4Us contest is also available in this launch video:

The DRC finals will occur June 5-6, 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona, California. The event will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; Twenty-five of the top robotics organizations in the world will gather to compete for $3.5 million in prizes as they attempt a simulated disaster-response course.

This post originally appeared on the DARPA Robotics Challenge blog. 

ATLAS climbs a ladder in December’s DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

Teams of roboticists from around the globe will convene in Los Angeles for the third and final round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge on June 5^th  and 6^th, 2015. For this phase, DARPA will be cutting the safety tethers, power cords, and network connections that previously assisted robots. The roster of participants has also changed, with Japan, Korea, and the EU electing to sponsor teams and Team SCHAFT, winners of the last phase, deciding to withdraw from the competition. DRC Program manager Gill Pratt explained that by raising the stakes and expanding participation, DARPA is hoping to foster the development of more advanced autonomous behavior for robots that operate in complex environments.

Pratt started the announcement by explaining how the Challenge has already exceeded his expectations. At the DRC Trials held last December (check out our beginner’s guide if this is news to you), organizers expected the winning team could maybe score about 15 points, but four teams exceeded that number and SCHAFT won 27. Now that participants have shown what they’re capable of, DARPA wants to push them further.

He explained that robot hardware was, across the board, robust, and teams did surprisingly well with grasping and dexterity, mobility, and human-robot interface design. But it’s time to solve, in Pratt’s words, “the really hard part of the robotics problem.” He wants humans and robots to be able to collaborate more effectively in the field by leveraging the unique capabilities of both. To see this happen, he’s changing the rules to force teams to rely less upon the remote control of individual joints and motions and instead implement task-based interfaces that incorporate advanced perception, minimal human guidance, and complex autonomous behavior.

The trial will still involve two attempts at eight tasks. But there’s a twist: robots will now only have an hour to perform all eight consecutively. In the last round, robots attempted each stage separately and were allotted 30 minutes for each task. The tasks have yet to be finalized, but details will be sparse until the teams converge in California for the competition. Seven tasks will be derived from the challenges of the last round, but one surprise task will be introduced at the competition. Pratt pointed out that robots will be “at least four times faster than the trials, and perhaps even faster.”

“We think the robot being able to survive a fall is difficult but not too hard. We have little information on the difficulty of getting up. This is a very new thing we’re trying, very high risk, for those machines that do fall down, it’s going to be really neat to see how they handle it, because […] humans will not be able to teleoperate the machine with any reasonable performance.”

At the DRC trials last December, the robots often moved excruciatingly slow and depended upon the careful control of remote human operators. Even with this divine guidance, they still fell down on their safety tethers quite often. But these handicaps will be gone in the next round. DARPA organizers want to see how well a robot can perform in the field without an umbilical cord, so they’re cutting the robots’ physical and electrical tethers. They’ve also decided that robots will entirely lose their network connection “for a substantial fraction of the time available” explaining this had the goal of preventing direct teleoperation.

In the December trials, robots were connected to tethers that kept them from crashing with the ground. In the next round, robots will lose their leases, fall down, and — hopefully — pick themselves back up. Source: Team IHMC

Pratt explained that these requirements were added to more accurately simulate the challenges faced by disaster robots at Fukushima-Daiichi. Robots depended upon limited battery power and thick concrete and steel-reinforced walls in the plant made network connectivity intermittent at best. And there certainly weren’t any safety lines to prevent the robots from falling.

Whenever the robots have a network connection, they’ll have significantly more computing resources than were available in the last round. Organizers are curious about the new paradigm of cloud-assisted autonomy and want to see how it could be used in field robots. So robots will have access to “as much computing power, as much disk space, as much crowd-sourced expertise” as the teams desire. Robots will also be able to connect to the internet. Look for DRC robots to ask for your assistance via Facebook next summer!

In the DRC’s final round, robots will have more resources available via their network connection, but the connection will only be intermittently available. Source: DARPA

Pratt also announced that the governments of Japan, Korea, and The EU are planning to sponsor teams. In light of this funding infusion, and the surprising performance of unfunded teams in the last round, DARPA has invited more teams to join this final round of the competition. Any team that can demonstrate a robot completing several “simple” DRC tasks is invited to submit a video to the DRC website by February 2^nd, 2015. Eleven teams are qualified at this moment but organizers are hoping 24 teams will participate next June.

Another important announcement today was the news that Team SCHAFT – winner of the December trials – has withdrawn from the competition to focus on commercializing its technology. Remember that Google acquired SCHAFT last December.

SCHAFT, who won the last round by 7 points, won’t be competing in LA next June. Instead, SCHAFT’s technology might soon appear in a Google robot. Source: DARPA

Considering executives’ assertions that Google had no plans to become a military contractor and the rumor that started circulating in January, SCHAFT’s disaffiliation from DARPA isn’t too surprising. As announced in March, the funding to which SCHAFT was entitled will be distributed among two previously-unfunded teams, THOR and ViGIR.

“[DARPA hopes] companies will pick up the technology developed in the DRC, develop it further, commercialize it, and the results will be cheap enough to make reasonably-priced disaster robots.”

By making the challenge so demanding and offering a $2 million prize, DARPA is hoping to lay the technological foundation for more autonomous and capable robots in the commercial market. In fact, DARPA will measure the success of the competition in part by the commercial investments in robotics that it inspires. To help DRC technology reach the market, DARPA and some participating teams plan to publish the lessons they learned in the challenge in academic journals.

Left: Team Stanford’s Stanley, the winning car of DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge.
Right: The Google Car, developed by a team led by Sebastian Thrun, former leader of Team Stanford. Sources: DARPA, Google

It’s reasonable to expect success — by hosting the Grand Challenge in 2003, DARPA turned the key on autonomous vehicles. Google acquired the winning team from Stanford, so you can trace their autonomous car’s lineage back to DARPA. With SCHAFT’s announcement and Google’s acquisitions of it and Boston Dynamics, history is repeating itself. Dr. Pratt’s vision of the DRC’s legacy seems to be materializing before the competition even finishes.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• DARPA’s Gill Pratt on Google’s robotics investments
• Robots Podcast: The DARPA Robotics Challenge
• Beginner’s guide to the humanoid robot challenge (DRC)
• Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare
• DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.
For more DRC reading, see our interview with Dr. Pratt.

When Google bought Boston Dynamics last December, the news made headlines, but it was not the first time the Internet giant has invested in DARPA-funded robotics. As part of Robohub’s Big Deals series, we asked Gill Pratt, Program Manager of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, to shed some light on what DARPA thinks about Google’s robotics acquisitions , and what it might mean to the robotics and open source communities.

Congratulations, Gill, on the DARPA Robotics Trials – what was your personal assessment of the event?

I was very pleased with how well the teams performed, and in particular that the hardware for the majority of the teams worked so reliably. In general, the teams did slightly better than we had expected and this was probably the result of a lot of very careful preparation. The infrastructure that we set up also worked reliably in the trials. Still, the DRC Trials were really just a beginning and showed us the potential of what can be done in disaster scenarios with robots.

Cloud computing was an important facet of the DARPA Robotics Challenge and especially the Virtual Robotics Challenge … How do you see cloud computing helping the development of robots?

The importance of cloud computing for Robotics falls into two different categories. The first has to do with simulation environments. We used cloud computing for the first time with the Virtual Robotics Challenge, which we had back in June as a precursor to the DRC Trials, to do real-time simulation of tasks in unstructured environments. We rented a whole lot of cloud computing space, we ran a very good simulator developed for DARPA by the Open Source Robotics Foundation, and we adjusted the latency – the time delay – so that it would be the same for all the teams, even though they were located in different parts of the world. It was a tremendous enabler to run a real-time competition based on simulation that also involves human-robot collaboration. Doing so required that the simulation run in real-time. That was a big first and we felt it was very successful.

Another important aspect of cloud computing is something that we have not used to date, but I think has a lot of potential for the future: the ability to have a robot’s computing and data hosted remotely. There’s a lot of potential for this, in particular for doing perception. Forty percent of the human brain is used for perception, and perception is one of the most difficult tasks for an autonomous robot. It’s very difficult to fit a computer with the size, weight, and power that you need to achieve really good perception onto a robot: the computer just gets too large, it consumes too much power, and it weighs too much. However, if you have access to cloud resources with lots of data and lots of computing cycles, they can help move that burden off of the physical robot.

Perhaps most exciting for the future of cloud computing in robotics is that when one robot learns how to perceive something, or learns how to do a particular task, that learning can be instantly shared with other robots. This sharing could have a catalytic effect on the capabilities of robots, particularly in structured environments.

This is really an up and coming field. How likely are we to see commercial interest come out of cloud computing for robotics?

If you look at the research being done we see a lot of possibilities with cloud computing for robots. In the commercial world, I think we are going to see it applied first to structured environments where there are lots of human artifacts — things like doors, stairs, furniture, tools — and where a large database of stored examples of these artifacts can help the recognition problem.

The Atlas robot, created by Bostron Dynamics and DARPA, was used by several teams in the DRC Trials. Source: DARPA

This is an interview for our Big Deals series, so we’re wondering, what does DARPA think about Google buying up some of the technologies that DARPA has spent years building? We’re thinking of the cars, the humanoids …

We are thrilled to see commercial interest. It’s one of the signs of success for the investments that we have made in future technology.

We think that it takes commercial investment to drive down the cost of technology. A very well known example is the cellphone. Cellphones have microprocessors in them that many years ago began with investments by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office and others. Cell phones have inertial measurement units to figure out the tilt of the cellphone. They have displays; they have GPS receivers; they have radio devices that work at low power. I can point to any number of DARPA investments that helped start those technologies, and of course cellphones now talk to the Internet, which is probably the best known output of all of DARPA’s investments. But if the Department of Defense wanted to produce a cellphone without the commercial world having picked it up and turned it into a product that billions of people use, it would cost many orders of magnitude more than it does now. It’s really because of the commercial world that we’ve seen the price of cellphones go down.

But DARPA is not only interested in seeding technologies with these early investments; we are also committed to solving real problems for national security. In fact, we have a variety of programs that use cellphones. One of these is called TransApps, where soldiers use smart phones to plan and carry out missions and layer and share data between teams. This is an example where investment by the commercial world made possible a national security capability that otherwise might not be feasible because of excessive cost.

By analogy, what’s going on in robotics is that we’ve seen some interest in the commercial world in taking this to the next step. And they have resources far beyond what DARPA has to further develop a technology and, most importantly, to drive down cost.

So these big deals are a good thing for DARPA?

Yes, they are a wonderful thing for DARPA and, more broadly, for our nation.

Do you think it’s a good thing for the field of robotics in general?

Absolutely, but I understand why there’s some anxiety.  It’s true that, for a very short time, some talented people in the field will be working for a commercial firm rather than for DARPA. However, that effect is transient and very small compared to the much more important thing, which is that these corporate investments both accelerate the field and show that it is going to be real.

This anxiety is a lot like the kind you get when your kids leave home. It’s sad, and for a while you’re going to miss them, but wait a while and then the grandkids come. The important thing is for Robotics to become a field that is not only about prototypes or lab demonstrations, but a field where significant resources are invested to make products that really improve people’s lives. We saw it with the Roomba vacuum cleaner, but we want to go beyond that. These kinds of commercial investments will make the field far more attractive to startups and to students who are planning their careers. The net effect is strongly positive.

How do you think this corporate interest in robotics will impact the open source community?

Open source is very important. It allows us to develop pre-competitive catalysts to help the whole field move forward.

In the integrated circuits world it was recognized that you couldn’t build experimental integrated circuits as easily as you could wire up a circuit with discrete components like capacitors and resistors and transistors that you solder by hand. As a result, people working in the area at that time needed to develop a simulator to allow for the experimentation of how a chip would work without actually having to make the chip. The idea was to do the design and the debug cycle on the computer in simulation instead of having to do it on the bench: when you were done you could press a button and have confidence that the chip would actually work. The open-source simulator SPICE filled that niche.

The very same kind of thing is true in the robotics field. The key is to recognize that simulation is really a pre-competitive technology now.  We don’t need to have proprietary closed simulation systems and keep reinventing the simulator over and over again. We’ve done it enough times now to know that it would be useful to apply open source. In the same way, I think that an operating system is precompetitive – it has been done enough times that a new company should not try to distinguish itself based on a proprietary version of an OS.

Rather, let’s just move on to the next thing where the real innovation is going to occur. DARPA funded the Open Source Robotics Foundation to develop an open source simulator for the DARPA Robotics Challenge because we think that it will catalyze the whole field to everyone’s advantage.

With the purchase of Boston Dynamics, some headlines were saying that Google bought military robotics. Is this an accurate assessment?

I think it’s very inaccurate. It’s based on the confusion – and the conflation – of two aspects of robotics: remote bodies and remote brains. A robot allows you to have a mechanical body take the place of a human being; for example, a robot can work in a dangerous environment while a human supervisor is in a safe place. And a robot also allows you to perform some of the function of the human brain autonomously in a remote location. When you conflate bodies and brains, and say that there is only one idea here, it’s like saying, “The robot looks like person, so it must be as intelligent as a person, and therefore I should be scared of all robots, particularly those funded by the Department of Defense.”

All of the robots that I’m aware of, except for the ones that actually have weapons or specialized sensors on them, are generic. They are neither military nor commercial. They are just robots that have mobility and perhaps some manipulation, but there are not classed to one type or the other. And they are all almost completely empty-headed: their bodies may look like ours, but their heads are almost totally empty.

In terms of autonomy, the technology has such a long way to go that the fears that have been generated are way out of proportion to the state of the art. At the DRC Trials, for example, we had people supervising the robots in pretty tight loops, telling them what to do. While autonomy may be able to handle very simple environments, close human supervision is going to be needed in unstructured environments for some time.

What do you say to people who are uncomfortable with the use of military robots in a commercial context?

I think there are legitimate concerns, but from a rational point of view it’s important to distinguish between a weapon, which none of the robots we are talking about are, and a machine that makes us feel scared because it looks like us but it’s hard to understand exactly how it works. Of course, science fiction has stoked that fear with movies like Terminator and so forth, but that reaction actually goes back a long, long way to stories like Frankenstein – anything that sort of looks like a person but is hard to understand will generate fear. It’s an emotional reaction. However, from a rational perspective, if you consider how little autonomy these real machines actually have, you realize that the worry is way out of proportion to reality.

What are some of the benefits that could come out of combining Google’s expertise in data with hardware from Boston Dynamics?

I don’t know the specific applications that Google is thinking of – it’s their prerogative to discuss them or not, and they haven’t told DARPA.

Generally speaking, when you think about data and robotics, there are a lot of exciting things that could happen. For example, you could do perception better by using a lot of data and sophisticated search. This is not necessarily the kind of search we think of when we type words into our browsers, but the kind that involves images, where a robot could say, “Okay, I see something and because of many prior examples I know what to do,” and share that data in a useful way.

Would voice commands play into this dynamic, in addition to visual search? Would it make it easier for humans to interface with robots?

I’m not an expert on voice, so I don’t want to speculate, but I know that you can train better when you have a lot of data. Voice and natural language recognition have the potential to help with planning and perception, and I think they could also facilitate more intuitive interfaces for sharing information between robots and humans.

Team SCHAFT raises the arms of its S-One robot in victory after successfully completing the Climb Industrial Ladder task at the DRC Trials. SCHAFT won that task and three others, and scored the most points of any team at the event. Source: DARPA.

What new robotic technologies will DARPA be pushing that might appeal to big companies that are not traditionally robotics focused?

We’re really interested in cooperation directly between robots and between human beings and machines. We are also interested in dealing with dynamic environments. What I would like to do for the future of the DRC, and what I think that DARPA is going to push even beyond that, is to answer questions like “What if the communication is intermittent?” and “What if the environment is beyond a set of familiar things that I’ve seen before?” … What do we do if we’re actually outdoors? How do we handle this piece of vegetation that’s in front of us? Do we go through it or around it? If we go through it, do we move the branches out of the way?

We also still have a lot of research to do to figure out how to apply cloud computing when the environment is unstructured, like it would be in disasters or outdoor scenarios.  And if the communications are intermittent, we have to figure out how to cache enough of the intelligence on the robot itself so that it can continue to do what it needs to even when it’s disconnected from the cloud. Of course, disconnected operation may be at a reduced level of effectiveness, but we don’t want the robot to stop altogether when communications go down for a little while. We want the robot to have at least some ability to complete the tasks it was given to do.

How do you actually put behavior in the cloud? How do you take a data driven approach to behavior? I think that’s very much an unknown thing right now. Data driven approaches to perception are easier to understand, but we are going to try to take the next step and look at behavior as well.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Snowden BEAMs into TED: How robotic telepresence disrupts borders
• Google’s robot and artificial intelligence acquisitions are anything but scary
• Will companies like Google and Amazon usher in a new era for robotics?
• The robots behind your Internet shopping addiction: How your wallet is driving retail automation
• What do Google, Amazon, IBM, Apple, Microsoft and all the airlines and car companies want?
• Robots Podcast: Privacy, Google, and big deals
• Robots, soldiers and cyborgs: The future of warfare

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Day One

Day Two

 
[ UPDATE 2 ]: This is the final results list with the points gathered by each team. You can also read the extensive coverage from Automaton blog here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-trials-results
and of course on the official website:
http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/

[ UPDATE 1 ]: coverage from Automaton blog:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-robotics-challenge-watch-it-live

Tweets about “#DARPADRC”

Click here for the trials event agenda (pdf)

This is a general overview of the arena and the tasks the robots need to perform, you can find more on the official website.

CHIMP – CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform – is one of 17 robots participating in the challenge.  The four-limbed robot has a wingspan of almost 10 feet and is designed to navigate on tank treads affixed to each limb.  For tasks that require use of its arms such as climbing a ladder or operating power tools, CHIMP can stand on its leg tread.  CHIMP also uses 360 degree sensing using a pair of laser rangefinder mounted to its head to visualize and map its surroundings, which a remote operator can use to analyze the disaster site.

In a recent press release, Tony Stentz, NREC director and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team said he has high hopes for the competition: “We’ve been on a fast track for the past year, doing detailed design and development of CHIMP at the same time as we were writing and testing its software on surrogate hardware. That’s an aggressive approach to producing a robot unlike any we have built and not without risk, but it appears to be paying off.”

And when it comes to his team’s readiness for the competition: “Even though we would love to have more time to practice with CHIMP prior to the trials, we’ve been pleased so far with its performance.”

The competition comes with high stakes – only eight of the seventeen teams will receive future DARPA funding to help prepare for the DRC finals next December.  All of the tasks in the competition require an extremely high level of mobility and dexterity by the robots. Some of these tasks include: driving a utility vehicle, going up a wall and cutting a hole, and opening and closing valves. If CMU’s performance in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge serves any indication, this year’s Tartan Rescue Team will be a strong contender for one of those eight spots. We will still have to wait to observe the long-term effects of the DRC on the robotics industry. Will it be just another exhibition of expensive robotic gadgetry or will it expedite the commercialization of rescue robots as the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges did for self-driving vehicles?

Link to audio file (40:39)

In this episode, Sabine Hauert interviews Paul Oh, the Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab at Drexel University. His team, spanning 10 universities, is competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) with the HUBO humanoid made by KAIST in South Korea. The goal of the challenge is to design robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters. Trials will take place next week in Florida from December 20-21 and will require robots to drive a vehicle, walk over rough terrain, clear debris, open doors, use a hand tool to break through a wall, climb a ladder, turn a valve, and finally drag a hose and connect it to pipes. The 7 HUBO robots on Oh’s team will be competing against sixteen other teams from around the world to determine which teams continues on to the DRC Finals in 2014 with continued DARPA funding. Competing in the 2014 Finals will lead to one team winning a $2 million prize.

The video below shows Oh’s vision for robot-enabled disaster response in 2020. You can find more videos of the HUBO working on tasks for the trials here.

Paul Oh
Paul Oh is a Full Professor at Drexel’s Mechanical Engineering Department, Affiliated Faculty in the ECE Department, and Director of the Drexel Autonomous Systems Lab (DASL). He received mechanical engineering degrees from McGill (B.Eng 1989), Seoul National (M.Sc 1992), and Columbia (PhD 1999). Honors include faculty fellowships at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (2002), Naval Research Lab (2003), the NSF CAREER award (2004), the SAE Ralph Teetor Award for Engineering Education Excellence (2005) and being named a Boeing Welliver Fellow (2006). He is also the Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Aerial Robotics and UAVs. From 2008-2010, he served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the Program Director managing the robotics research portfolio. Paul Oh was named ASME Fellow in 2011.
Links:

• Download mp3 (17.8MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Paul Oh’s Website
• DRC-HUBO team
• DRC coverage on Robohub

If you’ve recently wondered where all the roboticists were going, the answer is to an unassuming complex in Palo Alto. Google has backed Android developer Andy Rubin to acquire at least 7 major robotics companies, including Schaft, Industrial Perception Inc, Meka and Redwood Robotics. Other companies include Holomni, makers of high tech wheels, Bot&Dolly and Autofuss, the super cool robotics software companies behind the special effects in the film Gravity. Unsurprisingly, a number of the new acquisitions are also involved in the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge, where robots take on human scale problems in the latest Grand Challenge.

According to John Markoff’s interview with Andy Rubin in the New York Times, the new research company has plans for the manufacturing and logistics industry, with particular focus on the consumer electronics industry, where Rubin sees ‘clear opportunities’ to combat the increasing complexity of the massively growing field..

“I feel with robotics it’s a green field,” he said. “We’re building hardware, we’re building software. We’re building systems, so one team will be able to understand the whole stack.”

Google hasn’t yet announced whether or not this new robotics research group is a subsidiary or separate. But Rubin talks about a 10 year runway, and a vision. The vision is clearly to capitalize on the DARPA Grand Challenges, as Google has done so thoroughly with the automobile/self driving challenge. DARPA create challenges that plausibly have a 10 year solution, with sufficient early incentive and the self-driving cars have met most of the technical hurdles in less than a decade and now primarily face regulatory issues.

Google has purchased a number of teams and people involved in the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge or DRC, with an aim to commercializing humanoid robot research for manufacturing and logistics. And pure pleasure. With a 10 year runway, this is still a bit of a playground. Like Willow only double.

The first real world trial in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) will be held on December 20-21 2013 at Homestead Freeway in Florida. Yes, it’s open to the public. Anyone can come along and watch humanoid robots try to perform difficult disaster relief human type tasks. This is the geekolympics, it’s nerdvana. Honestly, it’s like sport only better. Here’s the basic background and the rundown on the top teams.

The DRC was inspired in part by recent disasters like Fukushima. In the DRC 2013 trials, the robots will need to perform disaster response operations such as driving a utility vehicle, traveling dismounted across rubble, removing debris from doorway, opening doors, climbing ladders, using power tools, locating and closing valves near a leaky pipe and connecting and using a hose. Connectivity with the robot may also be compromised during the Challenge. Simple tasks for a human but very very difficult for a humanoid robot.

BACKGROUND

DARPA’s Grand Challenges are designed to speed up important research in an area that has been previously difficult but has the potential to provide great changes. The idea of a grand challenge has a long history. Great achievements have come from competitions for centuries, from the invention of the pocket watch for longitude calculations to Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, from the introduction of the potato to the development of canning.

The rapid progress we’ve seen in driverless cars in the last decade owes everything to the last DARPA Grand Challenge. In 2004, DARPA held the first autonomous vehicle grand challenge, offering $1million prize money for a vehicle that could complete a 150 mile desert course. In 2004, the best result was 7.32 miles from the CMU team. DARPA offered a $2million prize for a repeat challenge in 2005 and this time all but 1 of the 23 finalists travelled further than 7.32 miles and 7 teams completed the course.

In 2007, the Grand Challenge was relaunched as an urban environment challenge. Eighty-nine applicants were whittled down to 35 contenders. Six teams successfully finished the course. By 2011, driverless vehicles were a commonplace sight on the 101 near Google HQ, with no reported accidents. That’s less than 10 years from zero to 65mph on the freeway.

Now we’re about to see the first real trials of the DARPA Grand Challenge for humanoid robots. Or at least for robots capable of working in a human environment. They don’t have to look humanoid but most of them do. In July of 2013, the first round of simulated trials was held to winnow down the 26 teams from 8 countries who had qualified to compete in the Gazebo VRC simulated environment.

”The reason we had this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams whose strength is primarily software,” said Dr Gill Pratt, DRC Program Manager.

After successfully completing 3 simulated disaster response tasks using Gazebo, the finalists should be able to transition their algorithms to ATLAS robots, built by Boston Dynamics for the physical DRC. The open source simulator will be an ongoing legacy for the robotics community, according to Brian Gerkey, the CEO of OSRF, the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

“The simulation work that we’re doing is really part of a broader effort to build a common ecosystem of software tools and libraries that everyone can use.” said Brian Gerkey, OSRF, in an earlier article on Robohub.

MEET THE TEAMS

The competing teams are either Track A; funded teams who are building their own robot and have passed various evaluations and reviews. Track B/C; funded/unfunded teams who successfully qualified in the simulator rounds (VRC) and have been given an ATLAS robot for the trials. And finally, Track D; unfunded teams from anywhere who have a humanoid and aren’t afraid to test it. The qualifying teams in the 2013 round will go on to compete again in December 2014, performing the same type of tasks, but with greater difficulty.

TRACK A

CHIMP
	CMU-NREC proposed to develop the CHIMP (CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform) robot for executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments. CHIMP will have near-human form factor, work-envelope, strength and dexterity to work effectively in such environments, yet avoid the need for complex control by maintaining static rather than dynamic stability.
Pittsburgh, PA	CMU Carnegie Mellon University | NREC National Robotics Engineering Center
Hubo
	Drexel University’s design focuses on a mature, open-architecture, bipedal robot call Hubo. Each member on Drexel’s team will be equipped with a stock Hubo, a complete, full sized humanoid. This infrastructure will catalyze a multi-university effort to “hit the ground running” and successfully address all anticipated DRC events in a “program-test-perfect” model.
Philadelphia, PA	Drexel University
RoboSimian
	JPL proposed to build RoboSimian, an apelike bio-inspired, limbed robot that will use deliberate and stable operations to complete challenging tasks under supervised teleoperation. The team, which includes contributions from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, will employ design methods, system elements and software algorithms that have already been successfully demonstrated in JPL’s existing robots.
Pasadena, CA	Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Valkyrie
	NASA Johnson Space Center proposed to develop a next-generation humanoid robot and control paradigm capable of performing dynamic, dexterous and perception-intensive tasks in a variety of scenarios. NASA JSC’s development approach will apply successful practices that have been used to develop multiple generations of Robonaut and related technologies in collaboration with academic, commercial and other government partners.
Houston, TX	NASA Johnson Space Center
HRP-2 based biped
	SCHAFT Inc. proposed a bipedal robot based on mature hardware and software designed for its existing HRP-2 robot. SCHAFT will create an Intelligent Robot Kernel in which it will combine the necessary software modules for recognition, planning, motion generation, motion control and a user interface. The group will divide into three teams to execute the tasks: hardware design, software integration and scenario testing..
JAPAN	SCHAFT Inc.
THOR-OP
	Virginia Tech proposed to develop THOR, a Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot, which will be state-of-the-art, light, agile and resilient with perception, planning and human interface technology that infers a human operator’s intent, allowing seamless, intuitive control across the autonomy spectrum. The team will emphasize three essential themes in developing THOR: hardware resilience, robust autonomy and intuitive operation.
Blacksburg, VA	Virginia Tech

Here’s a short video of all the Track A teams in action:

TRACK B/C (with ATLAS robots)

Team IHMC
	The IHMC team is confident it has an innovative approach to combine the cognitive abilities of humans, computational power, and the physical abilities of robots to handle novel situations in a new way.
Pensacola, FL	Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
WRECS
	Team WRECS strives to foster a dedicated and well-managed team, composed of students, professors, and professional engineers, collaborating to discover and lead the state-of-the-art research enabling advanced human-level performance for the Atlas humanoid. We aim to publicly demonstrate the successful completion of tasks related to major disaster response with the intent of leading to relevant peer-reviewed publications, credibility for future DARPA solicitations, and the ultimate goal of winning the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
Worcester, MA	WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS) Worcester Polytechnic Inc
MIT
	The MIT team, based at CSAIL, is drawing on research that is underway in several MIT departments and labs. For example, Teller’s own research group is developing methods that make it possible for robots to interpret sensor data, allowing them to make sense of their surroundings and understand their movements. They are also creating human-robot interaction methods by which humans can help robots formulate and carry out plans. State-of-the-art, real-time planning and control methods that are being developed in Tedrake’s lab make it possible for humanoid robots to balance, walk and climb.
Boston, MA	MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TRACLabs
	Over the past 15 years, TRACLAbs has used its 3T robot intelligence software to program robots to search for, find and recognize people, to recognize a user’s gestures to carry out tasks, to perform inspection tasks for the International Space Station, to hunt for mines underwater, and to form teams with humans to carry out repair and replacement tasks on earth or in space. We have also extended our approach to intelligent robotics to include graphical and natural language interfaces. So users of TRACLabs robots can motion-to, speak-to or just point-and-click the robots into action.
Webster, TX	TRACLabs
ViGir (Virginia-Germany Interdisciplinary Robotics)
	TORC engineers have been part of both the DARPA Grand Challenges and the Urban Challenge, where TORC led the software development VictorTango’s 3rd place finish. With two RoboCup world championship titles in autonomous humanoid robot soccer and two RoboCup Best-in-Class Autonomy awards for search and rescue robots, TU Darmstadt adds significant expertise in humanoid and rescue robotics to the team. The team will leverage experience from Virginia Tech’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) – a world leader in design and research of novel HCI concepts – and winner of three straight 3D User Interface IEEE competitions. Oregon State will provide expertise in human-inspired robotic grasping and manipulation.
Blacksburg, VA	Torc Robotics | TU Darmstadt | Virginia Tech | Oregon State University
TROOPER
	“Our team’s software solution controls a robot in a state of ‘supervised autonomy,'” said Bill Borgia, director of Robotic Systems at Lockheed Martin ATL. “This means a robot completes simple tasks independent of the operator. Then, if there’s something tricky the robot can’t work independently, a remote, and largely untrained, operator will step in and assist.” Lockheed Martin ATL is partnered with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and University of Pennsylvania (GRASP Lab) for the effort.
Cherry Hill, NJ	Lockheed Martin | University of Pennsylvania | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Team HKU
	“It is a significant accomplishment for our new initiative to produce a team that made it into the top 10 worldwide in its first attempt,” said Professor Norman Tien, HKU Dean of Engineering. “It is encouraging to note that researchers from the US, Japan and partner institution like the university of Edinburgh will join hands with HJU Team in developing advanced and sophisticated software, ie. cultivating a brain for the robot,” he added.
Hong Kong	Hong Kong University | Team K Japan | Case Western University

The ATLAS robot is based on the Petman humanoid robot platform and has been specifically developed by Boston Dynamics for teams in Track B/C of the DRC. ATLAS is a hydraulically powered robot in the form of an adult human. It is capable of a variety of natural movements, including dynamic walking, calisthenics and user-programmed behavior. ATLAS has:

• Near-human anthropometry
• 2 arms, 2 legs, torso and head.
• 28 hydraulically actuated joints with closed-loop position & force control
• On-board real time control computer
• Electric power & network tether
• On-board hydraulic pump & thermal mgmt
• Crash protection
• Modular wrists accept 3rd party hands
• Head-mounted sensor package with LIDAR, stereo sensors, dedicated sensor electronics and perception algorithms.

TRACK D

There will also be Track D teams who are unfunded and have built their own robots. Registration for Track D has now closed and DARPA have qualified 4 teams based on video footage of 3 tasks being attempted at the end of October.

Buddy
	Team Mojavaton developed an autonomous NISSan Xterra that finished in 13th place (out of 195) in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Now the self-funded, small but highly passionate and dedicated team of undergraduate students, professors and professional engineers take on the DRC with Buddy. Buddy features 34 electric servo motors that enable him to walk and use his two arms and hands. Buddy is special in that he’s a quadruped not a biped and we’ve made extensive use of 3D printing to build him, so that he’s a lot lighter than many of the other robots. While he’s only 4’8″ tall, his full wingspan is 6′.
Grand Junction, CO	Team Mojavaton
CHIRON
	Simple static motion and manipulation is very useful in tasks that require precision and reliability. The Chiron hexapod design gives great dexterity to travel over uneven terrain as well as stable manipulation. The majority of our team members have been focused primarily on hardware component creation, while a smaller number of team members have been focused primarily on software development. Team Chiron has benefited from numerous technology vectors produced by Kairos Autonomi.
Salt Lake City, UT	Team Kairos Autonomi
Intelligent Pioneer
	We divided the team into 6 groups, each one is responsible for a subsystem, and the subsystems include integration, machinery, controlling, perception, interaction and environment modeling. Software d and hardware are developed independently. Software in all subsystems is running under ROS architecture.
tbc	tbc
DRC-HUBO
	We separate team to develop basic technologies for tasks and each team conquer tasks. 1. Hardware and software Platform: Rainbow Co. 2. Vision: KAIST 3. Motion: KAIST and Rainbow Co. Each teams are involved to each task 1. Walking: SeoulTech and Rainbow Co. 2. Wall: Rainbow Co. 3. Other tasks: KAIST
Daejon Metro City, KOREA	Team KAIST
WATSON (not progressing to next round)
	Our biped WATSON (Without A Tether Stereoscopic OmniNavigation) was started 6 years ago, but early versions had trouble walking. We have since worked on the two major design areas that allow WATSON to walk and balance. We are now working on a neural net with our smaller platforms that will enable WATSON to learn to walk from the smaller platforms successes while avoiding mistakes with a larger heavier and more expensive robot.
Silicon Valley, CA	Team Walk Like A Man | Daniel Albert, Chris Mayer

Welcome to a wonderful month of robotics. Full reports on the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) are on the DRC website.

Based on a media rountable discussion with DRC Program Manager Gill Pratt and CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation Brian Gerkey.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster was a wake-up call to the robotics community. In Japan, many asked why a country known for its cutting-edge robotics sector was unable to respond to the emergency. Worldwide, robotics experts pointed to the event as a real-world test of what robots can and cannot do.

Whether man-made or natural — or like Fukushima, a combination of the two — major catastrophic events, while rare, are becoming increasingly costly as human populations worldwide move to urban areas. This is why, in an effort to spur the development of agile humanoid first-responders, the US Department of Defense’s strategic plan identifies disaster response as a priority area, and why it is funnelling tens of millions of dollars into the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

DRC Program Manager Dr. Gill Pratt envisions a future where tele-operated robots can be quickly deployed by disaster-response personnel with minimal robotics training: “In Fukushima, during the first 24 hours, the explosions would not have occurred if it would have been possible to vent the reactors,” said Pratt in a media round-table last month. “Human beings tried to do this but had to turn around [because of the radiation]. Our hope is to develop machines that can actually intervene and help make a disaster [like this one] less severe.” Estimates of the total economic loss due to the Fukushima disaster range from $250B – $500B US.

Why a humanoid?
Though having a robot that can safely navigate dangerous places like the inside of a nuclear plant is no-doubt useful, one has to question whether the extreme cost and design challenge of developing a humanoid that is capable of doing so is worth the effort. Yet as Pratt points out, a disaster scenario that is catastrophic to humans is also most likely to occur in an environment that has been engineered for humans, and what kind of robot would be more capable of navigating in a human environment and using the tools found there than a humanoid?

As DARPA project leaders were designing parameters for the Robotics Challenge, they consulted with first-response experts — including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and identified key capability requirements that indeed seem to point to a humanoid solution: the ability to go through doors, climb steep stairs, walk on rough terrain, and the ability to use whatever tools are oh hand, such as a utility vehicle or a screw driver.

“Our belief is that we will never know where the next disaster is going to hit and when it will be, and so we have to be prepared to use whatever tools are on hand,” said Pratt. “And at least for the foreseeable future, those are tools for people to use, and so we need to adapt our machines to use those tools as quickly as possible.”

Designing a roadmap for success
DARPA does not define the success of its programs through a profit and loss model, and its goal with the DARPA Robotics Challenge is not to bring a humanoid first-responder to every fire station in the country. As a government agency, DARPA focuses on bringing high-risk technologies to the point of prototype, and then handing these off to the military or commercial sector for development. It invests in challenges such as the DRC in order to spur radical innovation, and short-term technical failure is OK as long as the long-term potential payoff is high.

But despite these lofty goals, the question remains: what’s the roadmap for designing and overseeing a major robotics challenge such as this one? How does one gauge success when the potential payoff may be decades or more away?

DARPA’s previous autonomous car challenges offer some lessons, and one of them is that there isn’t always a winner.  Pratt admits that success for the DRC isn’t guaranteed, but says that the goal of the competition isn’t so much to declare a winner as it is to continually nudge the competitors towards greater achievements, while at the same time being realistic about what is actually doable. As a result, DARPA will be reevaluating the project’s milestones and adjusting the difficulty of the tasks in consultation with the participants along the way.

Previous autonomous car competitions are different from the current challenge in one major aspect, however: the older competitions were based on automotive technology, which already had a significant infrastructure in place. The robotics industry, by comparison, is still in its infancy, and so a great many hurdles exist for competitors, both at the software level and at the hardware level, and in terms of integration. Pratt has thus broken the competition down into three stages and four separate competitor tracks in an attempt to structure what is otherwise an extremely open-ended problem. (You can find a good explanation of how the competition breaks down on DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet.)

The first stage of the DRC — the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) — offers particular insight into DARPA’s strategy for success. The VRC, for which the results were announced earlier this month, was a cloud-based competition designed to test software, and its goal was to evaluate the teams’ robot perception, manipulation and locomotion in a virtual environment as a first step before moving on to the physical trials, which will take place in December of 2013. The big idea here is that teams will be able to try out their strategies in simulation first, before investing in hardware. “The reason we had this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams whose strength is primarily software,” said Pratt.

DARPA’s simulator models real-world physics and behaviours with incredibly high accuracy. Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSFR), the organization behind the VRC simulator, says that their goal is for the simulation to be the best possible stand-in for the real robot, so that teams that have done well in the VRC should be able to run their software virtually unchanged on the physical robot during the trials. And yet run to such a complex simulation — and to play that simulation back at interactive rates — takes a huge amount of computer power.

“One of the key developments over the past several years has been the advancement of cloud computing resources,” explained Gerkey. “It’s now possible to rent access to cloud computing resources so that you can have modest computer at your end and have the simulation run somewhere else. That’s a key aspect of this project and it’s really required in order to run the competition.”

The seven winning teams from the VRC challenge each received an Atlas furnished by Boston Dynamics for use in the DRC trials, where they will compete with other funded and unfunded teams that have been developing their own hardware (see DARPA’s Meet the Teams video to get a sense of what Atlas will be up against). They now have until late December to transfer their software algorithms to the Atlas hardware shell, and practice running a real machine in real environment. The physical trials should be a good demonstrator of the success of the simulator approach to competition design.

Building a legacy
DARPA takes a long view to technology development, starting with identifying a major national security need (in this case: disaster response), then determining the specific technologies and innovations needed to address that need (in this case: easily deployed agile humanoid robots), and finally working to support the fundamental breakthroughs required to make these technologies possible. DARPA’s disaster challenge is thus about creating infrastructure to support long-term software and hardware development in the robotics community; it’s also about attracting bright minds to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

One of the legacies of the VRC is that all the software code for the simulator is being distributed open source, and so, as Gerkey points out, there is no cost to reuse it later.

“The history of software development has shown that this is the best possible, most efficient development model for building the common platform that a whole community comes to rely upon,” says Gerkey. “The simulation work that we’re doing is really part of a broader effort to build a common ecosystem of software tools and libraries that everyone can use. There are computers that are powerful enough to run this simulation that you can rent for on the order of a couple of dollars an hour.”

The hope is that, ultimately, the open-source VRC simulator will help speed up the development of robots in general by lowering the barrier of entry and that this, in turn, will lead to more capable robots – perhaps ones capable enough to be of service in a Fukushima-like disaster. Says Gerkey: “Once we can run this very realistic simulation in a competition, we can then try this in a classroom scenario. You don’t have to outfit your classroom with expensive powerful computers.”

Pratt agrees: “Right now we have a few really talented designers and a few companies that are beginning to be strong in the robotics field. We would like to see those numbers go way up, and we believe that the way to do it is to give people a tool to develop these machines without having to incur the cost of first building them.”

Fostering international cooperation
Fukushima is used as an example to motivate the need for robotic platforms in dangerous environments, and the VRC is being promoted as an internationally beneficial endeavour, so I asked Pratt what specifically is being done to foster international cooperation, and whether there was a possibility that DARPA would work with other countries on future challenges.

Pratt answered that a key measure for success in this project is engagement with the international community. “All the code that we’re writing is distributed under the Apache 2 licence which is a very permissive open source license that allows anyone in the world to do anything that they want with this software. We would love for the challenge (once we are done with it in the next year and a half) to move around the world, and we have been in discussions with our counterparts in Japan and the EU about the possibility of this becoming a rotating contest. We think that [making societies more resilient to disasters] is a need that the whole world has, and so and I’m spending quite a lot of my time having lots of discussions about what the future of this is going to be once we are done … I personally think that the international part of this is a key way to measure how well we have done, so if we’re successful in having the DRC continue on somewhere else in the world, then it will be clear that we have done well.”

Though Pratt hesitates to predict how long it will be before we have robots capable of helping out in situations such as the one in Fukushima, he is convinced that DARPA’s Robotic Challenge will result in some major developments for the field:

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More info:

DARPA Robotics Challenge Website
DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet

Look out for DRC trial coverage in December!

The first competition of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was a software simulation of humanoid rescue work. The 6 best teams were to be allocated ATLAS robots for the next stage of the challenge, but there’s been an interesting change. Gill Pratt, the DRC program manager, and Nate Koenig, the CTO of OSRF, will be on reddit from 1:00 – 2:00 PM ET today (June 27) to discuss the results of the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) and the future of the DARPA Simulator with the community.

In the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), teams competed in a simulated suburban obstacle course. Twenty-six teams from eight countries qualified for the VRC, which ran from June 17-21, 2013. Competing teams applied software of their own design to a simulated robot in an attempt to complete a series of tasks that are prerequisites for the next stages of the grand challenge.

Gill Pratt: “The reason we wanted to have this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams that were strong not just in both building hardware for robots and programming them with software, but to include a wide variety of teams including those that had experience with just software. So for those teams whose strength is primarily software, we are having this contest in simulation. They will essentially be programming and interacting with a robot that we will provide for the people who will do the best in the contest, which is a robot called Atlas that was designed by Boston Dynamics. The government, at its expense, will give up to six teams who do the best in the VRC this robot to use in the [final] event itself.”

While DARPA had only allocated resources for the top six teams to move through, a combination of good sportsmanship and generosity will see members of the top nine teams move forward: