Gadgetory

we took a nasty spill yesterday that we know caused some structural damage from the robot the stress is palpable because this is it this is four years of our lives it's the third and final round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge teams have spent years designing robots that could aid in an emergency and potentially do much more and over the next two days they'll take them through an obstacle course meant to mimic a disaster zone it's a chance to win Millions and prize money and more than that show what the robots can do it's easy to design a robot that can handle a specific task there's police spots for bomb disposal and things like that where we aren't is general-purpose robots that can do a lot of things really well this is the Florida Institute for human and machine cognition they're Atlas robot fell twice during the first round and after some overnight repairs they're getting ready for their final run the robots have an hour to complete eight tasks first they have to drive a vehicle down a dirt road avoiding obstacles then they have to get out of the car one of the most difficult maneuvers then the robots open a door and walk through it once inside communication starts to break down the robots have to act more autonomously they have to turn a valve then cut a hole in a wall using a drill then complete a surprise task either flipping a switch or plugging a hose into the wall finally they have to get over a pile of debris and climb a set of stairs our approach to this is to have the robot do things that the robots good at and people do things that the people are good at and so people are very good at deciding which valve to turn which door to open we have a display where people can click on these objects and Shemp can use its sensors to determine exactly where that object is how to pick it up it's actually a lot like a video game the way the user interface is designed it's pretty simple like WASD controls mouse clicks left right click all that 200 times a second the robot is being commanded at its joints what to do it has laser rangefinders those are the spinning devices you see on chimps head they built a 360-degree three-dimensional model of the environment they have a video feed of the camera coming off the robot the algorithm just makes it not fall over and giving this configuration how do I keep my balance in general people get their ideas about robotics from science fiction from books or movies and of course real science fact is nothing at all like that so what's going on yeah yeah we're a couple hours out I guess what time is it it's a wait what is today I don't know I don't even know what today is we took a nasty spill yesterday we're just now kind of figuring out what that damage is we have 24 team members here we've got close to a hundred that have worked on this project at some point in time this is a really good test of our operator interface because if our operator can operate a robot that's broken from the get-go and still complete even a few of the tasks will be totally happy t-minus 20 seconds to go dressed i HMC took second place coming in six minutes behind South Korea's team cased and they're transforming will need robot hue bow a lot of robots fell over and broke during the finals but they were much faster and more autonomous and they were the year before it's really big in Western culture to see a big humanoid robot like Atlas and immediately think terminator and the misunderstanding there's just because a robot looks like a human does not mean that it's processing information or thinking like a human there there are all the problems I mean everywhere there are problems there are different members of our team that don't sleep under on different nights there's what we call the Shakey's a controller on board the robots computers are telling the robots you know to shift slightly to the left shift slightly to the right and when that goes out of control we got the chi-chi's where the entire robot vibrates and falls over walking is not a form of artificial intelligence it's it's rigorous algorithms for how to not fall down if 10 or 20 years from now we see robots not only for disaster response but for construction and agriculture and use in the home for aging society and healthcare I think will have been a success too