Why So Many Robots Struggled With the DARPA Challenge

stowie writes: The DARPA Robots Challenge concluded recently, and three teams were given prizes for completing all the tasks. The other robots in the competition struggled — not only were they unable to complete the required tasks, many of them were unable to even stay standing the entire time. So why did these robots have such a hard time? "DARPA deliberately degraded communications (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent connection) during the challenge to truly see how a human-robot team could collaborate in a Fukushima-type disaster. And there was no standard set for how a human-robot interface would work. So, some worked better than others. The winning DRC-Hubo robot used custom software designed by Team KAIST that was engineered to perform in an environment with low bandwidth. It also used the Xenomai real-time operating system for Linux and a customized motion control framework. The second-place finisher, Team IHMC, used a sliding scale of autonomy that allowed a human operator to take control when the robot seemed stumped or if the robot knew it would run into problems." If nothing else, the competition's true legacy may lie in educating the public on the realistic capabilities of high-tech robots.

Comments

They all struggled, at first.

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Does everyone forget the DARPA Grand Challenge from 2004? The second year (2005) they had 5 vehicles finish. 4 of them within the 10 hour limit.

In 2007 they had the 'urban challenge'.

Now we have driverless cars and semis. Google and Uber are poaching a lot of of the grad students and professors from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.

Re:They all struggled, at first.

[Jack Griffin]

Now we have driverless cars and semis.

Do we?
Sure we have a whole bunch of cool stuff in controlled environments, but the nature of a public road is that it is uncontrolled. For some reason a lot of people underestimate how much of a difference there is between the two.