Official Details For the DARPA Robotics Challenge 61
An anonymous reader writes "The DARPA Robotics Challenge is offering tens of million of dollars in funding to teams from anywhere in the world to build robots capable of performing complex mobility and manipulation tasks such as walking over rubble and operating power tools. It all will culminate in an audacious competition with robots driving trucks, breaking through walls, and attempting to perform repairs in a simulated industrial-disaster setting. The winner takes all: a $2 million cash prize."
Immenant Disaster... (Score:4, Interesting)
This is classic DARPA... while these grand challenges are good for focusing research initiatives, they tend to ask for much more than the field can offer in a reasonable amount of time given the funds. Look at the first grand challenge: not a single team finished the race, and even the best team from the best school with the most funding only finished 12km of the proposed 240km course.
It was an utter embarrassment. Only after they relaxed the requirements in 2005 of the competition to more accurately reflect what was humanly (or more aptly roboticly) possible at the time was the competition a success.
Now they're expecting a full-on humanoid that can drive a car, bust down walls, move rubble, operate tools, all in unstructured environments? Look at the DARPA ARM grand challenge, where the state of the art could barely do these kinds of manipulations in a controlled well-lit laboratory.
On the other hand, I suppose if they're allowing teleoperation/assisted autonomy that makes things a lot easier. I guess I just don't want a repeat of the collective embarrassment of the robotics community that happened in 2004.
Re:Immenant Disaster... (Score:4, Interesting)