By Carl Weiss
You may have missed this item
in the news recently, but on December 20 sixteen teams duked it out at the
DARPA Robotics Challenge for a chance to win $2 million. Sporting monikers like RoboSimian, Valkerie
and Atlas, these aren’t your daddy’s droids.
These robots walked like a human and were required to perform a number
of tasks such as driving a vehicle, climbing a ladder, open doors and turning valves. While not able to replace their human counterparts as of yet, the competition was clearly designed to raise the bar in
order to eventually create a rescue robot that could be sent into harm’s way in
situations where humans fear to tread.
(Imagine how useful these bots could have been in Fukushima during the tsunami and reactor disaster.)
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| Photo Credit http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/ |
Not that you’d mistake these
bots for your typical rescue worker.
Looking more like a Tinkertoy than the Terminator, Schaft the winner of
the competition (recently acquired by Google), resembles a boom box sprouting arms and legs. Standing 4 feet 8 inches tall and weighing in
at 209 pounds, it is unlikely to win any beauty contests. However, what it lacks in looks it more than
makes up for in utility, if its performance at the DARPA competition is any
indication.
To begin with, all the
robotic competitors were required to be able to drive a rescue vehicle and
navigate their way around a series of objects.
Just as with most emergency situations that could require the services
of a rescue robot, you can’t always assume that the location will be pristine. Whether induced by tornado, hurricane, tsunami, earth
tremor or act of war, being able to negotiate a rubble-filled roadway is job
number one for any would be rescuer. When disaster strikes what is required is a
robot that can think on its feet.
While many people are
familiar with bomb disposal bots being used in Iran and Afghanistan, most of
these are operated remotely, necessitating that a human be at the
controls. While this kind of operational
environment works in ordinance disposal, in the kinds of environments that
rescue robots would be sent to work, the need for autonomous operation is
imperative.
In the first place, ordinance
disposal droids are typically tracked and are usually limited to one
articulated limb. Rescue robots on the
other hand are fully articulated and are required to perform tasks that would
be difficult to accomplish in a telepresence-only mode. Secondly, in high radiation areas, relying on
remote controlled robots could prove difficult, since radio interference would
be almost a certainty.
Photo Credit http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/
To make the competition more
like a real disaster area, DARPA broke the playing field into 8 Tasks: Driving
a Vehicle, Handling Rough Terrain, Climbing a Ladder, Clearing Debris, Opening
Doors, Cutting Through a Wall, Opening a Valve & Using a Hose. I know several humans that would have had a tough
time accomplishing all of these tasks.
For semi-autonomous robots, the task was daunting, which is what
separated the bots from the boys in the recent competition in Miami.
Of the sixteen teams entered
into December’s competition, only seven scored in the double digits. Several
competitors such as NASA’s Valkerie failed to score even a single point, which
shows how difficult the tasks were to accomplish. Kind of like an Olympics for robots, the
winners will advance onto the finals which are going to be held in the next
12-18 months. Even those who did not
make the cut will be able to learn from their mistakes as well as from more
successful competitors.
- Team
SCHAFT (SCHAFT Inc.): 27 points
- Team
IHMC Robotics (Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition): 20
points
- Team
Tartan Rescue (Carnegie Mellon University and National Robotics
Engineering Center): 18 points
- Team
MIT (MIT): 16 points
- Team
RoboSimian (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory): 14 points
- Team
TRACLabs (TRACLabs, Inc.): 11 points
- Team
WRECS (Worcester Polytechnic Institute): 11 points
For those who couldn’t make
the trip to Miami to see the competition live, fear not, because you can find
the replay on YouTube. While the video shows the robots going through their
paces, don’t expect to see the kind of performance that we have all come to
know and love in Star Wars. While some
of the robots were able to score points by performing one or more of their
assigned tasks, they did them with all the rapidity of a Galapagos tortoise. That doesn’t mean that rescue robots are
something only likely to save someone on the big screen. What it means is that like aerial drones and
autonomous vehicles, while these automatons are not yet ready for prime time,
within several years these robots could be coming to a disaster area near
you. Until then it’s up to the ingenuity
and persistence of robotics engineers to keep putting their best bot forward.
Carl Weiss is co-host of the weekly radio show Working the Web to Win which is broadcast every Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can also see the show on YouTube.
Great article. The future is here. Ready or not.
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