Google's Schaft Wins DARPA Robotics Challenge
Written by Harry Fairhead   
Sunday, 22 December 2013

Google seems to have a way with DARPA challenges, first the self driving car and now the rescue robot. Yes, Google's team Schaft has won. 

The DARPA robotics challenge to create a robot that can be useful in rescue operations took place December 20-21, 2013, see DARPA's Robot Challenge Gets Underway .

The final score board showed a clear winner, way ahead of the rest of the competitors:

darparobotfinals

 

The scoring was 1 point for each of four sub-tasks completed in a 30 minute period. Given that there were eight tasks in total the scores are out of a maximum of 32. This means that Schaft seems to have done particularly well, but the 32 minute time allowance didn't produce a realistic performance from the robots. The robots took their time making slow movements following long pauses while they planned the movement. As a result there is a further to go in creating useful rescue bots than the scores might suggest.

It is also worth noting that team Schaft is one of the robotics companies now owned by Google as part of its rapid acquisition of a range of companies including the well-known Boston Dynamics, maker of a range of military grade robots. Schaft, a Japanese robot company, entered its off-the-shelf HRP-2 robot which is surprisingly more able than the previous star of the show, the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. 

 

darpaschaft

 You can the Schaft in action in this speeded up video:

 

You have to admit that with its strange wide body it doesn't look too convincing, but it seems to be stable and the arms seem very up to the job of complex manipulations.

It is only a shame that the real world performance wasn't as fast as this video. It does emphasise the fact that speed seems to be the biggest obstacle that a rescue robot needs to overcome. However, this might be cause for optimism because when it comes to speeding things up we have lots of ways of achieving the goal.

 

Up to eight teams will receive up to one million dollars to progress to the next stage of the challenge and their names will be announced soon.  It appears that Google's company will be the number one contender in next year's trials. Where self driving cars go presumably rescue robots follow.

 

More Information

http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/

Related Articles

DARPA's Robot Challenge Gets Underway

Atlas Walking Over Randomness       

Google Adds Boston Dynamics To Its Robotics Acquisitions

DARPA'S ATLAS Robot Needs A Brain       

DARPA Robotics Challenge       

BigDog Throws A Cinder Block       

Darpa's Mule Looks Useful       

Google drives a car       

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, FacebookGoogle+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

Summer SALE Kindle 9.99 Paperback $10 off!!

esp32book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

 

Banner


Microsoft And Oracle Announce Oracle On Azure
18/09/2023

Oracle and Microsoft have jointly announced an expanded partnership that will make it easier to run Oracle on Azure.



The PyCon AU and SciPy 2023 Sessions Are Now Online
15/09/2023

The talks presented at the 2023 PyCon Australia and SciPy are now available as YouTube playlists. Topics ranged from Data cleaning and visualization to APIs, GUIs and Parallelism.


More News

 

Last Updated ( Sunday, 22 December 2013 )