DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals

Background

The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals took place on 5 and 6 June 2015 at the Fairplex in Pomona, California.^[1] The event was run by DARPA, which set the competition up as a test of complete robots rather than of individual technologies: teams brought their own machines and had to get them through a fixed course of work inside a time limit, with as little human help as possible.

The course and the rules

According to DARPA, 23 teams competed for $3.5 million in prizes.^[2] Each team had to work through eight tasks in the space of an hour.^[2] The tasks came one after another rather than as separate, independently scored events, so a robot that failed or stalled lost time it could not easily make up.

Two conditions shaped the whole contest. First, the robots had to run on their own onboard power, with no tethers feeding them electricity from outside.^[2] Second, communications between robot and operator were severely degraded on purpose.^[2] Together these rules push a team away from teleoperation — a person driving the machine — and towards machines that can be trusted to carry out a step largely on their own, with the human stepping in only at a few decision points. In practice that means the difficult part is not any single motion but keeping a robot working, and recovering, over a long sequence of them.

Results

All three winning teams finished with eight points, so the places were decided by the least time on the course.^[2] Team KAIST of Daejeon, South Korea, and its robot DRC-Hubo took first place and the $2 million prize.^[2] Team IHMC Robotics of Pensacola, Florida, finished second with its robot Running Man, winning $1 million.^[2] Third place and $500,000 went to Tartan Rescue of Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center, with its robot CHIMP.^[2]

The scoring detail is worth keeping in mind: the top three were not separated by what they could do, but by how quickly they did it. A single course run under time pressure therefore decided the ranking among the leading machines.

The audience and what the organisers hoped for

DARPA said more than 10,000 people watched from the Fairplex grandstand over the two days.^[2] A robotics trial of this kind is unusual in being staged as a public event, with a grandstand and a running clock rather than a closed laboratory.

DARPA programme manager Gill Pratt said the event could show the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks but to help connect people to one another.^[2] That framing puts the value of the finals in two places at once: in the engineering demonstrated on the course, and in the sight of teams, machines and spectators gathered around the same problem.