Controlled by teams on the ground, Robonaut 2 humanoid robot holds an instrument to measure air velocity during another system check out in the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station - (14 March 2012)
Google’s Newly Acquired SCHAFT Robot Walks Away A Winner
The DARPA Robotics Challenge trials, or DRC, ended yesterday. The 16 teams and their bots pushed, stumbled, drove, strutted and clambered their way through 8 disaster recovery-related challenges put to them by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science arm, over the course of the last two days.
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Team SCHAFT, which got started at Tokyo University and became a private company, ruled the field, garnering best in task awards in half of the challenges: the walking on uneven terrain challenge; the ladder-climbing challenge; debris clearing; and the hose-connecting challenge.
Team leader Yuto Nakanishi focused intently on his bot, a 5-foot, 5-inch, 209-pound blue bipedal machine, as it moved with uncanny grace through the challenges. Nakanishi was the very picture of cool and collected until the machine completed a given task with nary a stumble, at which point he pumped his fists and let rip a victory yell.
SCHAFT ruled the Challenge, but now Google rules SCHAFT. The Internet search company confirmed a week before the DRC trails that it had bought the team along with Boston Dynamics, the company that built the Atlas robots with which 7 of the teams competed.
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