Brett Daniel Shehadey
Special Contributor for In Homeland Security
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is undertaking a revolution in robotics with its two-year Robotics Challenge that began last October. The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) is a competition prompting companies, entrants and inventors to develop the best humanoid robot capable of rescuing humans from difficult and potentially hazardous environments. It is intended for disaster-response operations.
Program Manager Gill Pratt said: “One of DARPA’s goals for the Challenge is to catalyze robotics development across all fields so that we as a community end up with more capable, more affordable robots that are easier to operate. The value of a cloud-based simulator is that it gives talent from any location a common space to train, design, test and collaborate on ideas without the need for expensive hardware and prototyping. That opens the door to innovation.”
The virtual event just ended, June 17-21. “The tasks included: entering, driving and exiting a utility vehicle; walking across muddy, uneven and rubble-strewn terrain; and attaching a hose connector to a spigot, then turning a nearby valve” (DARPA). The virtual robots were operator controlled and the simulation was about creating effective software and application through a virtual environment that will largely mimic the live events to follow.
A total of 126 teams registered and 26 teams competed from eight different countries. The top nine moved on to the next stage. The top six earned funding and an ATLAS humanoid robot. The others will have to create their own humanoid robot.
ATLAS has become the DARPA choice for their sponsored entrant of the DRC. According to the DARPA website:
ATLAS is a hydraulically powered robot in the form of an adult human. It is capable of a variety of natural movements, including dynamic walking, calisthenics and user-programmed behavior. Based on the Petman humanoid robot platform, Atlas was modified to meet the needs of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
•Near-human anthropometry
•2 arms, 2 legs, torso and head.
•28 hydraulically actuated joints with closed-loop position & force control
•On-board real time control computer
•Electric power & network tether
•On-board hydraulic pump & thermal mgmt
•Crash protection
•Modular wrists accept 3rd party hands
•Head-mounted sensor package with LIDAR, stereo sensors, dedicated sensor electronics and perception algorithms.
The live challenge events will begin this December and again on December of 2014.