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Pensacola's IHMC Competes In International Robotics Finals

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A team from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola is traveling to California this week to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Doug Stephen, a Research Associate at IHMCexplained the purpose of the competition.

“The DARPA robotics challenge is an international competition which is put on, organized, funded by DARPA, which is the research and development arm of the Department of Defense. The idea of this competition is to, sort of, really rapidly accelerate what is the state of the art in robotics, particularly in terms of being able to use robotics in sort of dangerous or disaster-recovery scenarios. Especially, you know, recovery in a man-made area where you might have a collapsed building or something of that nature that has been compromised; maybe fire, maybe structural collapse, maybe nuclear fallout like happened at Fukushima a few years ago, where you can’t sen a person in but you have an environment designed for people. So you might have stairways you might have really narrow passageways, you might have doors and tools and valves and things that you need to manipulate but you can’t really send people in without  putting them in danger. So this whole competition is designed to push forward the state of the art in robotics so that we can really seriously begin considering taking people out of the  equation. Or at least have them on the back lines doing remote operations on these machines so that lives aren’t at risk”

A total of 25 international organizations will be competing in the challenge. IHMC and six other teams are using the Atlas robot, built by BostonDynamics. But IHMC is using its own software on Atlas, and one other team is also using IHMC’s software.  Stephen says the robots of every team will be put through a series of tests.

“The structure of the competition, the way you place, the way you compete, is sort of like an obstacle course. There are eight defined tasks that the robot has to accomplish and for each task that it accomplishes it gets a point and then if there is a tie it comes down to who did the whole thing faster. So that if there are two robots that get a perfect score the robot who completed the course the quickest will rank above the other robots. The tasks that the robot has to complete: it has to be able to drive a utility vehicle, sort of like an open air polaris, similar to an off-road vehicle. That’s one point. The next point is successfully getting out of the vehicle without falling down and breaking yourself. Next the robot has to open a door and enter a simulated degraded building, that’s the third point. Once you’re inside the building there are various tasks the robot has to accomplish to get the other points, that includes using a power tool to cut a hole in a wall, turning a round valve like you would see to open or close a big hose or a big pipe. The robot has to be able to either choose between navigating over some really rough terrain or clearing it’s way through some kind of debris field. There’s going to be a surprise manipulation task, it might be something like pushing a button or flipping a switch, closing like a big 480 transformer circuit, something like that.”
Stephen says the IHMC team currently has about 25 members, but over the past three years a large number of researchers and interns and others who have rotated in and out of the program. And that team will have total control over the robot during the competition.

“Our approach is little to no autonomy really. Every motion that the robot carries out is directed by a human operator. How the robot accomplishes that motion is up to the software and the control algorithms and all that stuff. But if a robot is going to move its hand somewhere or take a step somewhere it’s going to be the direct result of an operator command.”

And one of the toughest challenges of having a humanoid robot operate like a human is something we take for granted every day.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to make a robot walk and stand, a lot of people ask, what is the point of making a robot that looks like a human? You know, just stick tank treads or wheels on them or whatever. Because walking is a surprisingly hard problem to solve. We take it for granted because it’s something we do subconsciously, we dont’ think about walking and balancing. So it’s this whole interdisciplinary field of studying, you know, trying to formally define or mathematically define what constitutes balance and what constitutes an effective way to walk. And then turning that into computer programs, and it’s harder than you might think. And that’s the core of what we do, though, the robotics lab at IHMC, we’ve done a whole bunch of different things. We have, you know, UAVs and micro air vehicles and the robots and everything, but our core, our foundation in the robot lab is always been based in these really fantastic researchers who have a really strong background in walking and balancing.”

And all the hard work can really pay off. The top prize for the DARPA Robotics Challenge is $2 million. Second place is $1 million and third place is $500,000. Stephen says it’s exciting to see years of work finally get a chance to see the light of day.

“It’s not about beating the other teams for us, it’s about overcoming the individual tasks, because they are very interesting tasks from a robotics point of view. So for us, it’s always been us against the course, not us against 24 other robots. Just trying to figure out ways that we can do the best possible, most interesting, and also most fun, for us as scientists, research.”

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is this Friday and Saturday, June 5 and 6 in Pomona, California. If you can’t make it out to watch, Doug Stephen says the competition will be live streamed on You Tube.

Bob Barrett has been a radio broadcaster since the mid 1970s and has worked at stations from northern New York to south Florida and, oddly, has been able to make a living that way. He began work in public radio in 2001. Over the years he has produced nationally syndicated programs such as The Environment Show and The Health Show for Northeast Public Radio's National Productions.