Jon Excell

Korean team wins DARPA robotics competition

News

A robot developed by a team of Korean researchers has won first prize in the DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Project Agency) robotics challenge, which was held this weekend in California.

The competition, which began over two years ago has seen a number of robots from around the world compete against each other in a series of challenges designed to test their ability to respond to disasters.

During a two-day long final in Pomona, California, 24 robots went head-to-head in front of thousands of spectators and attempted to complete a course of eight tasks relevant to disaster response.

These included driving and exiting a car, opening a door, closing a valve, using a power tool to cut a hole in a wall, clearing debris, turning off a switch and climbing stairs.

The winning entry, Team Kaist from South Korea, took home $2m of prize money for its DRC-HUBO (Humanoid RoBOt), which performed all eight tasks more quickly than any of the other entries. (It took just 44 minutes, 28 seconds)

The second place prize of $1m went to team IHMC from the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, FL and its robot Running Man, which is based on Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot.

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