Slashdot Mirror
The DARPA Robotics Challenge Was a Bust; Let's Try Again
malachiorion writes: The DARPA Robotics Challenge, the biggest and most well-funded international robotics competition in years, was a failure. After years of grueling work on the part of brilliant roboticists around the world, and millions in funding from the Pentagon, the finals came and went with little to no coverage from the mainstream media. The only takeaway, for those who aren't extremely dialed into robotics, is that a ton of robots fell down in funny ways. There were winners, but considering how downgraded the tasks were, compared to the ones initially announced in 2012, it was closer to the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where none of the robot cars finished, than the Urban Challenge, which kicked off the race to build deployable driverless cars. So just as DARPA regrouped after that first fizzle of a race, here's my argument for Popular Science: It's time to do it again, and make falling, and getting up, mandatory.
It is too harsh to call it a failure. After watching many hours of video footage, I would judge it most certainly NOT a failure, but a good first step. Yes, many robots fell down. Yes, it would be nice to make a requirement for them to get up -- and at least one did in the *competition*, if i recall correctly. The tiny robot an Asian student was *demonstrating* (he didn't speak much English) got up amazingly fast since he designed it in.
It is understandable that DARPA reduced the difficulty in this first baby step of the competition. What would you rather have, (a) very difficult tasks so that no team can complete all tasks, or (b) difficult enough so not *all* teams can complete all tasks, but some can? I'd choose (b) every time, since it results in encouragement to take the next step in the development. There are many other benefits if you think about it for a minute or two.
... and plenty of the crawling robots also ended up falling over.
But why no love for the videos of robots failing and falling? There are plenty of videos of legged robots not falling, and they are positively terrifying for the humans vs. robots crowd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...