Google has been buying robot companies
First there was
Boston Dynamics.
Now, we find that they had also purchased a Japanese company
SCHAFT Robotics
The SCHAFT team just won this years
DARPA Robotics Challenge
From
Gizmodo:
Google's Newly Acquired SCHAFT Robot Walks Away A Winner
The teams have broken down their robots and packed them up in crates and suitcases, loaded them into trucks and taken them on airplanes and gone home. Some will lick their wounds and rebuild to fight another day. The lucky ones will get a million dollars each from DARPA to continue developing their bots.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge trials, or DRC, ended yesterday. The 16 teams and their bots pushed, stumbled, drove, strutted and clambered their way through 8 disaster recovery-related challenges put to them by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's mad science arm, over the course of the last two days.
"This has been an extraordinary event that has exceeded my expectations by multiple, multiple times," said Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager in charge of the DRC, during a closing ceremony. "I've been saying to the media for quite some time that I would be thrilled�thrilled�if even one of the teams scored half of the points in the DRC trials. Well, it turns out that 4 scored over half the number of points."
Team SCHAFT, which got started at Tokyo University and became a private company, ruled the field, garnering best in task awards in half of the challenges: the walking on uneven terrain challenge; the ladder-climbing challenge; debris clearing; and the hose-connecting challenge.
Team leader Yuto Nakanishi focused intently on his bot, a 5-foot, 5-inch, 209-pound blue bipedal machine, as it moved with uncanny grace through the challenges. Nakanishi was the very picture of cool and collected until the machine completed a given task with nary a stumble, at which point he pumped his fists and let rip a victory yell.
There is an external framework to prevent damage if the robot falls but this little guy is operating completely autonomously. It is specially programmed for each event but there is no instruction while it is operating -- it has to recognize the barriers in the road, uneven ground, objects to remove, valves that need to be operated, etc...
More. Faster. Please.
Posted by DaveH at December 22, 2013 1:12 PM