Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals”.
We took a nasty spill yesterday that we know caused some structural damage to the robot. The stress is palpable, because this is it. This is four years of our lives. It’S the third and final round of the darpa robotics challenge teams have spent years designing robots that could aid in an emergency and potentially do much more and over the next two days.
They’Ll take them through an obstacle course meant to mimic a disaster zone. It’S a chance to win millions in prize money and more than that, show what their robots can do. It’S easy to design a robot that can handle a specific task.
There’S police spots for bomb disposal and things like that, where we aren’t is general purpose robots that can do a lot of things really well. This is the florida institute for human and machine cognition. Their atlas robot fell twice during the first round and after some overnight repairs, they’re getting ready for their final run. The robots have an hour to complete eight tasks. First, they have to drive a vehicle down a dirt road, avoiding obstacles. Then they have to get out of the car one of the most difficult maneuvers.
Then the robots open a door and walk through it. Once inside communication starts to break down the robots have to act more autonomously. They have to turn a valve, then cut a hole in a wall using a drill, then complete a surprise task, either flipping a switch or plugging a hose into the wall. Finally, they have to get over a pile of debris and climb a set of stairs.
Our approach to this is to have the robot do things that the robot’s good at the people do things that the people are good at, and so people are very good at deciding which valve to turn which door to open. We have a display where people can click on these objects and chimp can use its sensors to determine exactly where that object is how to pick it up. It’S actually a lot like a video game. The way the user interface is designed.
It’S pretty simple, like wasd controls, mouse clicks left right click all that 200 times the second. The robot has been commanded at its joints. What to do it has laser rangefinders. Those are the spinning devices you see on chimp’s head. They build a 360 degree. Three-Dimensional model of the environment, they have a video feed of the camera coming off the robot.
The algorithm just makes it not fall over. It said giving this configuration. How do i keep my balance? In general, people get their ideas about robotics, from science fiction, from books from movies and, of course, real science fact is nothing at all like that. T-Minus 33 minutes here.
So, what’s going on um a couple hours out, yeah yeah we’re a couple hours out. I guess uh, what time is it? It’S uh wait. What is today, i don’t. I don’t even know what today is. We took a nasty spill yesterday and we’re just now kind of figuring out what that damage is.
We have 24 team members here. We’Ve got close to 100 that have worked on this project at some point in time. This is a really good test of our operator interface, because if our operator can operate a robot, that’s broken from the get go and still complete even a few of the tasks. We’Ll be totally happy t-minus 22 seconds go loading egress scripts ihmc took second place coming in six minutes behind south korea’s team, cased and they’re transforming we’ll need robot hubo.
A lot of robots fell over and broke during the finals, but they were much faster and more autonomous than they were the year before. It’S really big in western culture to see a big humanoid robot like atlas and immediately think terminator and the misunderstanding. There is just because a robot looks like a human does not mean that it’s processing information or thinking like a human.
There are all the problems i mean everywhere. There are problems. There are different members of our team that don’t sleep under on different nights.
There’S what we call the shakies, the controller on board, the robot’s computers are telling the robot. You know to shift slightly to the left or shift slightly to the right, and when that goes out of control, we get the shakies where the entire robot vibrates and falls over walking is not a form of artificial intelligence. It’S it’s rigorous, algorithms for how to not fall down if 10 or 20 years from now, we see robots not only for disaster response, but for construction and agriculture and use in the home for aging society and health care.
I think will have been a success too. .