Inventions

Atlas- IAN

IHMC Robotics Pensacola, FL

The DRC Finals will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; the winning team will receive a $2 million prize.  Technologies resulting from the DRC will transform the field of robotics and catapult forward development of robots featuring task-level autonomy that can operate in the hazardous, degraded conditions common in disaster zones.

TEAM TROOPER ATLAS: Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories

The primary technical goal of the DRC is to develop ground robots capable of executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments. Competitors in the DRC are expected to focus on robots that can use standard tools and equipment commonly available in human environments, ranging from hand tools to vehicles, with an emphasis on adaptability to tools with diverse specifications.

To achieve its goal, the DRC aims to advance the current state of the art in the enabling technologies of supervised autonomy in perception and decision-making, mounted and dismounted mobility, dexterity, strength, and platform endurance. Success with supervised autonomy, in particular, could allow control of robots by non-expert operators, lower the operator's workload, and allow effective operation even with low-fidelity (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent) communications.

Jet Propulsion Labs is building RoboSimian

The DRC consists of both robotics hardware and software development tasks and is structured to increase the diversity of innovative solutions by encouraging participation from around the world, including universities, small, medium and large businesses, and even individuals and groups with ideas on how to advance the field of robotics. Detailed descriptions of the participant tracks are available in the DRC Broad Agency Announcement. A secondary goal of the DRC is to make software and hardware development for ground-robot systems more accessible to interested contributors, thereby lowering the cost of acquisition while increasing capabilities. DARPA seeks to accomplish this by creating and providing government-furnished equipment (GFE) to some DRC participants in the form of a robotic hardware platform with arms, legs, torso and head. Availability of this platform will allow teams without hardware expertise or hardware to participate. Additionally, all teams will have access to a government-furnished simulator created by DARPA and populated with models of robots, robot components and field environments. The simulator will be an open-source, real-time, operator-interactive virtual test bed, and the accuracy of the models used in it will be rigorously validated on a physical test bed. DARPA hopes the creation of a widely available, validated, affordable, and community supported and enhanced virtual test environment will play a catalytic role in development of robotics technology, allowing new hardware and software designs to be evaluated without the need for physical prototyping.

KAIST Humanoid Robot Research Center and other is Rainbow Co:  HUBO

Team SCHAFT, the highest-scoring team at the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials in December 2013, has elected to switch to the self-funded Track D of the program. The team was recently acquired by Google Inc. DARPA will now include on the list of DRC Trials finalists Teams THOR, ViGIR, and KAIST, which each earned eight points in the DRC Trials. Teams THOR and ViGIR are each eligible for up to $500K of DARPA funding. Team KAIST, which is already part of Track D, will continue as a self-funded team.

Team TRACLabs, Houston TX: HERCULES

Professor Dennis Hong, the leader of Team THOR at the DRC Trials, has moved to The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a result, Team THOR has opted to split into two teams that will divide the DARPA funding. One team will be based at UCLA under the leadership of Prof. Hong, while the other team will remain at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) under the leadership of Prof. Tomo Furukawa. DRC program manager Gill Pratt noted, "The decision by Team SCHAFT to self-fund allows DARPA to expand the competition and further develop disaster response robots.

This expansion is similar to what happened after DARPA held the Virtual Robotics Challenge in June 2013, when some teams shifted resources and allowed us to increase participation. I look forward to seeing the results of efforts by our new finalists and new team."