Such kind of Robot competition known as DARPA Robotics Challenge was organized and hosted by U.S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this June. The event was attended by hundreds of people from all over the U.S. This two day competition was full of excitement as the robotic wars were found serious more than ever.
Total of 8 tasks were assigned to the teams within one hour of time. These included driving a utility vehicle, drilling a hole in the wall, completing a surprise task, walking up the short stairs etc. these tasks were attempted without any support such as tying a rope to avoid the robot from falling over despite a lot of hassle was seen as there was a continuous miscommunication between the robot and their human operators.
The day went off slowly. None of the robots could complete the driving tasks hence it was replaced by another task of ‘walk and roll over’. A number of teams attempted this task well. Tea, Aero form Japan, Team Valor from Virginia tech and Team Grift from Colorado appeared prominently but couldn’t made to the finals.
Things were spiced up when the team IHMC from Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida stepped into the Arena, the robot manufactured by the Waltham, Boston dynamics was seen rocking the day by completing 7 out of 8 tasks with perfection and earned the highest points.
The competition got better and better in the afternoon when numerous teams were on fire! One of the teams know as Worcester Polytechnic-Carnegie Mellon team also managed to successfully complete the 7 tasks, surprising the driving task as well. After that, the team Nimbro from Germany also completed total 7 tasks in less than 35 minutes which was just superb. The other teams which impressed the audience by their good performance included MIT, RoboSimian. Reticent at first, the crowd grew louder as the day went on, cheering wildly when the robots achieved each task.
Here comes the name of best performers of that day, Team Tartan Rescue's CHIMP robot, from CMU. This robot managed to complete all the 8 tasks successfully which was a great achievement as all of the top robots could pass only 7 tasks. Not only that the CHIMP was even able to pick himself up after falling.
So this was all from this competition which entertained the audience magnificently. After seeing such a large audience showing up, we are expecting more of such competitions lined up ahead. This is certainly going to boost up the robot industry. This is also a great source for the manufacturers for earning recognition for their work.