Google’s Schaft robot won the US military robotic challenge and is poised to secure more Pentagon funding to develop a creation capable of venturing into dangerous disaster zones to help humans.
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| Google’s Schaft robot in action |
The folks at Google have a lot to cheer since their newly acquired company, Schaft, Inc. of Japan, won the robotics challenge trials sponsored by the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The trials were held this weekend at Florida’s Homestead Miami Speedway.
Sixteen teams with robots competed for a place in next year’s final, when DARPA will award a $2 million grand prize to the winner. The robots were designed to complete eight challenging tasks–the kind that would be required as part of response efforts to natural or man-made disasters, such as walking over uneven terrain, clearing away debris, and climbing a ladder.
The winning Schaft robot, a 209-pound humanoid just under five feet tall, scored 27 out of a possible 32 points, beating Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot by seven points. Carnegie Mellon University’s CMU Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform (CHIMP) came in third with 18 points. The top eight performers will get a chance to compete in the 2014 finals.
Adam Jacoff, a robotics research engineer with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, told Live Science that the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials is “one of the biggest robotics evaluations on Earth and dwarf many military robot tests, both in scale of ambition and the actual effort involved.”--Source: The State Column