HOMESTEAD (Reuters) — As a squat,
red-and-black robot nicknamed CHIMP gingerly pushed open a spring-loaded
door a gust of wind swooped down onto the track at the Homestead-Miami
Speedway and slammed the door shut, eliciting a collective sigh of
disappointment from the audience.
The robot, developed by the Tartan Rescue team from the National
Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, was one
of 17 competing in the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency's (DARPA) Robotics Challenge.
The agency, which funded basic science research for now commonplace
technologies like the Internet and global positioning satellites,
hopes the competition will spur the development of robots that can
work in places too dangerous for humans.
The challenge was launched in 2011 in response to the meltdown of
Japan's Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant after it was hit by a
massive earthquake-spawned tsunami. Nearly 160,000 people were
forced to flee the area.
The backup power systems needed to cool the plant's reactors failed
and an emergency team from Tokyo Electric Power Company was unable
to enter the damaged reactor building due to the intense radiation.
DARPA sent robots designed to disarm improvised explosive devices in
Iraq to Japan, yet by the time workers were trained to use them it
was too late to prevent a nuclear meltdown.
"What we realized was ... these robots couldn't do anything other
than observe," said Gill Pratt, program manager for the DARPA
Robotics Challenge. "What they needed was a robot to go into that
reactor building and shut off the valves."
Hydrogen continued building in the days that followed, fueling a
massive explosion.
During the two-day trials at a south Florida professional race car
track, the platoon of robots faced obstacles designed to mimic the
challenges following a disaster. Robots had to cut through a
reinforced concrete wall, navigate debris-strewn terrain and locate
and turn off leaking valves. Officials from DARPA also disrupted the
link between robots and their operators, further simulating a
disaster.
The eight teams with the highest scores will be awarded $1 million
in funding to prepare for the final round in late 2014, where a
winner will take $2 million.
While Carnegie-Mellon's CHIMP eventually opened the door, leading
the field on Saturday was a two-legged robot from Japan's team
SCHAFT, which finished first in the test, according to the DARPA
Challenge website.
The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, based in
Pensacola, Florida, took second place. Third went to Carnegie Mellon
and CHIMP.
Successes in the challenges are about as common as failures. Many
robots tumbled off an industrial ladder designed to test sight and
balance.
"Murphy's law is very big in robotics," said Daniel Lee, a robotics
professor at the University of Pennsylvania and program director for
Team THOR, an agile, human-form robot, whose acronym stands for
Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot. "It's very difficult to account
for all of the uncertainties that you're going to face," he said.
A handful of teams, including ones from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology and Lockheed Martin, used a six-foot-two-inch,
330-pound humanoid robot named Atlas that DARPA contracted from
Boston Dynamics, a company that was spun out of MIT in 1992 and
recently acquired by Google.
A team from NASA's Johnson Space Center competed with a robot called
Valkyrie covered in white plastic and vinyl, looking like a human
wearing a robot suit.
Some robots looked highly mechanized, while others had four legs and
resembled a dog.
"The goal is to make it comfortable for people to work with and to
touch," said Christopher McQuin, NASA's chief engineer for hardware
development.
After the final round next year Pratt said there are plans for
another robotics challenge, possibly to be hosted in Japan.
For the next advance in robotics, he said, "the amount of
intelligence inside the robots needs to be able to handle small
tasks."
"We don't want to burden human operators with saying put your foot
here, put your other foot here, put your hand there," he added.
(Additional reporting by Kevin Murphy in Kansas City, Missouri;
editing by David Adams and Jackie Frank)
