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The DARPA Robotics Challenge Was a Bust; Let's Try Again

Posted by samzenpus on from the one-more-time dept.

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.

5 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Not a failure by rathinam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not a failure by JediJorgie · · Score: 2

      I have to agree. The goal was to encourage development. The program was a complete success. It does not matter if anyone succeeded at all the tasks.

    2. Re:Not a failure by funwithBSD · · Score: 3, Informative

      As I tell my 12 year old son:

      You don't learn anything when you win the game of chess, you learn something when you lose.

      A bit oversimplified, but the point is that you learn by rising to the challenge, not just by your success.

      --
      Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
  2. Re:This is shortsighted by rwa2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... 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?...

  3. OK, but it was pretty boring IRL... by bodog · · Score: 2

    I went for one morning of the competition, and there was a LOT of standing around and waiting time. Even when the robots were in action, they would take very long pauses in the midst of the narrowly defined activity they were performing.(and yes, sometimes simply falling over during the pauses). It would have been hard to pick more than a few seconds of footage that would have made it into the news.(mostly the falling over clips)