The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)–the U.S. Defense Department’s research arm responsible for developing new military technologies–will watch their futuristic, multi-limbed robots taken out for a spin next week to test their disaster-response capabilities at the DARPA’s Robotics Challenge Trials. The Trials will take place Dec. 21-22 at Florida’s Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Dr. Gill Pratt, DARPA’s Robotics Challenge program manager, said in a recent teleconference that 17 teams will take the robots through eight realistic disaster-response tasks and that the best performers will provide researchers with a baseline for the state of robotics. DARPA will fund up to eight of the highest-scoring teams for another year as they proceed to the DRC finals in 2014. The winner will receive a $2 million prize.
“The purpose of the program is to develop technology that can help make us much more robust to natural and man-made disasters,” Pratt explained, adding, “In particular, we’re looking at robotic technology that can allow us to mitigate the extent of a disaster during the first hours and days while the disaster is still unfolding.”
DARPA’s disaster-mitigation program originally was inspired by the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Pratt said. That disaster was caused when an earthquake and tsunami destroyed the backup power systems needed to cool the plant’s reactors, causing three of them to melt down, explode, and release dangerous amounts of radioactive material.
“During the first 24 hours there,” Pratt said, “if only human beings had been able to go into the reactor buildings and vent built-up gas that was accumulating inside the reactors, the explosions that occurred might have originally been prevented and the disaster would not have been that severe.”
And that’s only one example, Pratt said, adding:
“We don’t know what the next disaster will be, so the technology we’re trying to develop [will] allow human beings and robots working together to have an effect on evolving disasters in environments that are too dangerous for human beings to go into by themselves.”
DARPA began the program with more than 100 teams and put on a first event in June that was a simulated robotics challenge. Sine then, the agency has narrowed the field to 17. The teams represent countries and organizations ranging from large and small businesses to software firms to universities to government agencies like NASA.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials are free and open to the public.
