After leading throughout the competition, Schaft, the Japanese robotics start-up recently purchased by Google, was officially crowned winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials when they ended on Saturday. Schaft has only been around since 2012, when it spun out of the JSK Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, but it thoroughly dominated the DRC
[ UPDATED: The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials have ended, with the robot from Schaft Inc. taking the title. Hours of archived coverage of the event are available here. ] To watch the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials live from Florida’s Homestead Miami Speedway, click the following link for a YouTube stream: DARPA Robotics Challenge Live Broadcast
On April 1, 2012, plans were first announced for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and after more than a year of anticipation, the robot competitors will finally be put through their paces starting tomorrow. The two-day event, which takes place Dec. 20-21 at the Homestead-Miami Speedway in Homestead, Fla., is actually the second stage of the
The next round of the DARPA Robotics Challenge is just a week away, and we’ve started to see a lot more of the robots that will be competing. NASA finally gave a glimpse of its entry earlier this week, and Carnegie Mellon University just released a variety a photos and videos of its robot, known
The International Space Station’s robotic crewmember Robonaut 2 is currently legless, which is less of a problem in space than it would be on Earth but still poses certain limitations. NASA engineers evidently weren’t satisfied with that arrangement, however, because they went ahead and built a set of legs that are scheduled to arrive at
The field for this month’s DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials is now set, with four self-funded teams — who built their own hardware and software for the competition — rounding out the line-up. Previously, we learned about the seven teams that survived the Virtual Robotics Challenge and received an ATLAS robot as well as the six
One of the advantages of humanoid robots is that — in theory — they can make use of existing infrastructure and tools that were designed for humans. That premise will be put to the test in a big way at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where a variety of robots will be asked to perform human-like
The teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge come from some of the most prestigious universities and technologically innovative organizations in the world — places like MIT, Carnegie Mellon and NASA. However, even for them, it represents uncharted territory. “It’s a huge learning experience,” admits Bill Borgia, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Lockheed
Last week, DARPA and Boston Dynamics unveiled Atlas, the humanoid robot that seven lucky teams won the right to program for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in December. They will be competing against a group of teams that created their own search-and-rescue robots, which remain shrouded in considerably more mystery. As we near the competition,
In the first stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which we reported on here, contestants were asked to demonstrate that they could navigate a virtual robot through a variety of simulated challenges. The winners received the honor of moving to the next round with a real robot provided by DARPA to compete for a spot
