DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals June 5-6

[GKrotkov]

Originally Posted by asid61

This is super cool. Are they required to use human-like robots, or is that just the easiest way to do things?

It's just the answer that most of them came up with. It may help that the robot provided for teams that do not wish to build their own, ATLAS, is humanoid.

Also, one of the requirements is the "Ability to manipulate and use a diverse assortment of tools designed for humans"


What's interesting is that this challenge might illustrate how close this technology is, even though it looks halting and slow now. The DARPA urban challenge was in 2007 (footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQFEmR50HAk), on known ground and with only other robots on the road; but now Uber is buying all the autonomy experts around and Google is thinking about going to market with an autonomous car! Perhaps robotic autonomy and dealing with variable situations isn't quite so far away as we might think.