The HUmanoid roBOt, or HUBO,
from Rainbow Co. and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (KAIST) Humanoid Robot Research Center, looked very good at
some times during the first day but ran into a bit of trouble.
For instance, when it had to use a drill to cut a hole around a black circle on a wall, it didn’t go all the way around the black circle in one area.
Still, KAIST’s HUBO did move quite quickly in the process of completing the tasks.
By the end of the first day of the competition, Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot was at the top of the standings, with eight points, having completed all tasks in 55 minutes and 15 seconds.
The robot even managed to get up on its own after falling. Amazon, Foxconn, and Google, among others, are sponsoring the Tartan Rescue team, which hails from Carnegie Mellon University. (Tartan Rescue team members Tony Stentz, Eric Meyhofer, and David Stager are all said to be working on Uber’s autonomous vehicle project; team sponsor Google, of course, has its own driverless-car initiative.)
The Tartan Rescue CHIMP and other robots on wheels, like Team NimbRo Rescue
from the University of Bonn’s Computer Science Institute, moved more
quickly and smoothly than humanoid robots taking steps with feet. The
ATLAS robot that several software-only teams chose to rely upon has
feet, not wheels.
Generally speaking, the robots on display during the competition moved quite slowly. Watching DARPA’s live stream from home, it was hard not to shout at the screen to tell the robot to come on and move forward and start doing the task already.
And it was painful to watch the robots fall, partly because many of them are fragile. After the wipeouts, crews could be seen approaching the robots. Seeing multiple people huddled around these machines was a comforting reminder of just how dependent cutting-edge robots still are on human labor.
The ATLAS Hercules robot, from team TRACLabs Inc. of Webster, Texas, took a particularly bad fall today during the egress task, which involves getting out of a vehicle after driving it forward.
At first Hercules looked like it would succeed in the task, with onlookers clapping, but then, while stepping down from the vehicle, things went sideways — literally. Hercules put its left foot down on a step stool on its way down to the ground, but then appeared to lose its balance. The robot in slow motion tilted to the left, then fell all the way to the ground with a great thud. “Awwwwww,” said people watching on site. “Nooooo,” I said, while watching from my living room.
But hey, at least Hercules did manage to drive the vehicle, a Polaris Ranger.
There were little errors to laugh at, too. Today the ATLAS Warner robot from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon University — sponsored by Nvidia and Axis Communications — dropped the drill it was going to use to make a hole in a wall, and then moved on to the next task.
For instance, when it had to use a drill to cut a hole around a black circle on a wall, it didn’t go all the way around the black circle in one area.
Above:
Team KAIST’s HUBO robot failed to drill the whole way around the black
circle on the wall at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona,
California, on June 6.
Image Credit: Screenshot
By the end of the first day of the competition, Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot was at the top of the standings, with eight points, having completed all tasks in 55 minutes and 15 seconds.
The robot even managed to get up on its own after falling. Amazon, Foxconn, and Google, among others, are sponsoring the Tartan Rescue team, which hails from Carnegie Mellon University. (Tartan Rescue team members Tony Stentz, Eric Meyhofer, and David Stager are all said to be working on Uber’s autonomous vehicle project; team sponsor Google, of course, has its own driverless-car initiative.)
Above:
Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot picks up a drill for the wall task at the
2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California, on June 4.
Image Credit: Screenshot
Generally speaking, the robots on display during the competition moved quite slowly. Watching DARPA’s live stream from home, it was hard not to shout at the screen to tell the robot to come on and move forward and start doing the task already.
And it was painful to watch the robots fall, partly because many of them are fragile. After the wipeouts, crews could be seen approaching the robots. Seeing multiple people huddled around these machines was a comforting reminder of just how dependent cutting-edge robots still are on human labor.
The ATLAS Hercules robot, from team TRACLabs Inc. of Webster, Texas, took a particularly bad fall today during the egress task, which involves getting out of a vehicle after driving it forward.
At first Hercules looked like it would succeed in the task, with onlookers clapping, but then, while stepping down from the vehicle, things went sideways — literally. Hercules put its left foot down on a step stool on its way down to the ground, but then appeared to lose its balance. The robot in slow motion tilted to the left, then fell all the way to the ground with a great thud. “Awwwwww,” said people watching on site. “Nooooo,” I said, while watching from my living room.
But hey, at least Hercules did manage to drive the vehicle, a Polaris Ranger.
There were little errors to laugh at, too. Today the ATLAS Warner robot from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon University — sponsored by Nvidia and Axis Communications — dropped the drill it was going to use to make a hole in a wall, and then moved on to the next task.
Above:
The WPI-CMU Warner ATLAS robot drops the drill it was going to use to
make a hole in a wall at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona,
California, on June 6.
Image
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