South Korean robot takes home $2m prize in DARPA challenge

A robotics team from South Korea took home the $2 million first-place prize in a competition this weekend to design robots that could aid humans in a natural or man-made disaster. During the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, which took place in Pomona, California on Friday and Saturday, the winning team’s DRC-HUBO robot (pictured) finished all eight tasks in less than 45 minutes. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started the challenge in 2012. The competition was inspired by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, caused by the deadly 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The idea was to develop robots that could aid emergency responders in disaster recovery efforts by going places that are unsafe for humans.

Today was incredible. It was everything we hoped it would be and more.

Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager in charge of the challenge

The Running Man robot from Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition claimed second, finishing all the tasks in just over 50 minutes. Team Tartan Rescue’s CHIMP robot came in third. The 25 teams had two chances to complete as many as possible of the course’s eight tasks, which included driving a utility vehicle, exiting the vehicle, opening a door, cutting a hole in a wall, walking over a pile of rubble (or clearing a path through debris), walking up a short flight of stairs, and completing a surprise task, which was different each day. The bots had to complete the course without a tether to prevent them from falling over and despite a disrupted communications link between the bots and their human operators.

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