Korea’s Team KAIST Wins the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge

As a robot enthusiast, I found it strangely captivating watching these slow, mostly bumbling robots complete and try to complete the tasks. It seems like it would be boring but I had the main commentary stream going pretty much all day in the background while I worked on software for my own bipedal robot. Whenever something important was happening, the audience would cheer or the commentator would point it out so you didn't have to fully pay attention the whole time.

The key thing to take from this is that there is a huge gulf between the best robot competitors and the worst. The best robots seemed like, with more hardening, they could be deployed in certain disaster areas even today. The worst robots seemed to struggle just walking on two legs on anything but perfectly smooth terrain. Laugh while you still can at the numerous fail videos that will emerge but the KAIST team's robot will make you a believer. That robot was very clever as were most of the other robots from the top teams.

A slight correction to the linked article: the IHMC robot did not just promptly fall after climbing the stairs and celebrating; instead, its arm got caught on the rails of a platform that the stairs led to. It had already completed all tasks of the course.

neurologic• 11 years ago

The winning entry used slow and handcrafted controllers, which is why the videos are sped up. A few months ago, http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/ was announced. Notice that in the videos here the robot's movement is very fast and humanlike (real time, as opposed to 15x of the KAIST video). This technique will be used in all of the robotics challenges in a year or two, which will look like a discontinuous improvement in robotics performance.

iamcreasy• 11 years ago

I was cheering for NASA's Robosimian. They was it was transforming was truly captivating.

snehesht2• 11 years ago

Here's another video of Cheetah jumping during a run https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65a0RFhdd8

Korea’s Team KAIST Wins the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge

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