Nine teams have merged into seven and are receiving support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to compete with an ATLAS robot in the 2013 DARPA Robotic Challenge Trials, the agency said.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) was created to spur development of advanced robots that can assist people in mitigating and recovering from future natural and man-made disasters.
The first of three DRC events was a software competition carried out in a virtual environment that looked like an obstacle course set in a suburban area. That was the first test team-designed software that might control successful disaster response robots.
The software testing also was the world’s first view of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Simulator, an open-source platform that the agency believes could revolutionize robotics development.
Disaster response robots require multiple layers of software to explore and interact with their environments, use tools, maintain balance and communicate with human operators, the agency said in a statement.
In the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) event, competing teams applied their own software designs to a simulated robot in an attempt to complete a series of tasks that are required for more complex activities.
Twenty-six teams from eight countries qualified to compete in the VRC, which ran from June 17-21.
DARPA said it had allocated resources for the best six teams, but, the agency said, “good sportsmanship and generosity” will allow members of the top nine teams to move forward.
The competing teams were:
1. Team IHMC, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Fla. (52 points).
2. WPI Robotics Engineering C Squad (WRECS), Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass. (39 points).
3. MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. (34 points).
4. Team TRACLabs, TRACLabs, Inc., Webster, Texas (30 points).
5. JPL/UCSB/Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. (29 points).
6. TORC, TORC / TU Darmstadt / Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (27 points).
7. Team K, Japan (25 points).
8. TROOPER, Lockheed Martin [LMT] / University of Pennsylvania / [RPI] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cherry Hill, N.J. (24 points).
9. Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio (23 points).
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| Guiding ATLAS Robot Over Different Terrain Image: DARPA |
The top six teams earned funding and an ATLAS robot from DARPA to compete in the DRC Trials in December, the second of the three DRC events and the first physical competition. DARPA also is funding several other Track A teams to construct their own robot and compete in the Trials. The Trials are the second of three DRC events, and the first physical competition.
“In a demonstration of good sportsmanship,” DARPA said the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which also has a DARPA-funded Track A effort with its own robot, decided to merge its two efforts and offer the bulk of the resources it earned in the VRC to other teams. The agency split the resources thus freed up between the next two teams:
The robot associated with the JPL win and some funding now goes to Lockheed Martin’s TROOPER.
Additional funds are being allocated to a newly formed team of Team K and Case Western. That team, now known as HKU, will use an ATLAS robot donated to it by Hong Kong University to participate in the DRC Trials in December.
Thus, seven teams with ATLAS robots and DARPA support will attend the DRC Trials, where they will compete with other teams with their own robots.
The VRC teams were evaluated based on task completion and effective operator control of the robots in five simulated runs for each of three tasks addressing robot perception, manipulation and locomotion, the agency said in its statement.
The agency said robots had to: enter, drive and exit a utility vehicle; walk across muddy, uneven and rubble-strewn terrain; and attach a hose connector to a spigot, then turn a nearby valve.
To simulate communications limitations in a disaster zone, the VRC imposed a round trip latency of 500 milliseconds on data transmission, and varied the total number of communications bits available in each run, from a high of 900 megabits down to 60 megabits, the statement said.
To conduct the VRC, DARPA funded the Open Source Robotics Foundation to develop a cloud-based simulator that calculates and displays the physical and sensory behaviors of robots in a three-dimensional virtual space, in real time. The simulator allowed teams to send commands and receive data over the Internet to and from a simulated ATLAS robot–information very similar to what would be sent between a physical robot and its operator in the real world.