The Walking…and Falling Robots of DARPA’s Robotics Competition
8:21 minutes
In response to the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, the U.S. military research agency DARPA put together a competition to challenge teams to build a robot that could navigate a disaster landscape. The final round of the competition happened this week. Gill Pratt, program manager of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, takes us through the 23 different walking…and falling…robots, and the difficulties in engineering these kinds of machines.
And here’s a compilation of robots falling down at the Challenge:
Gill Pratt is program manager for DARPA Robotics Challenge in Boston, Massachusetts.
Alexa Lim was a senior producer for Science Friday. Her favorite stories involve space, sound, and strange animal discoveries.