S. Korea’s team KAIST wins 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge

PanARMENIAN.Net - Roboticists from around the world came together in Pomona, California, U.S., for the 2015 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, and DARPA has named the winner: Team KAIST of South Korea, VentureBeat reports.

The team is a collaboration between the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) Humanoid Robot Research Center and from Rainbow Co., a company that was spun out of the research lab. The team’s humanoid robot, or HUBO, stands 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing in at 176 pounds. It works in bipedal mode, and it can kneel down to roll around on wheels.

This is a major accomplishment for the team — and a long time coming. The team has scored $2 million — IHMC Robotics, which came in second place, is walking away with $1 million, while third-place team Tartan Rescue from Carnegie Mellon University is going home with $500,000. The event comes after the DARPA’s software-based Virtual Robotics Challenge in June 2013 and the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in Homestead, Fla., in December 2013.

Robots had to do things like drill a hole in a wall, walk up steps, and tread uneven ground. But the Internet network that teams used to communicate with their robots at times didn’t work for 30 seconds or more, to simulate real-life conditions. That made matters somewhat difficult for the 23 teams, who hailed from the U.S., China, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, and South Korea.

Robots would breeze through some tasks but then stumble at others. Over time, some began to look generally capable than others.

The IHMC Robotics team, from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, with sponsorship from Amazon and Atlassian, sat at the top of the standings midway through the first day of the challenge. IHMC was fielding an ATLAS robot from Google-owned Boston Robotics called Running Man. But the bot proved imperfect. It fell over and missed out on scoring a point while walking over rubble, the VentureBeatsays.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is a competition of robot systems and software teams vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters. It was designed to be extremely difficult. Participating teams, representing some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world, are collaborating and innovating on a very short timeline to develop the hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces that will enable their robots to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response.