NASA JSC's Valkyrie Robot Tied For Last Place in DARPA Competition
Handicapping the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge, Gizmodo
“NASA JSC Team Valkyrie (7/1): Johnson Space Center has a 20-year legacy in humanoid robot development, and the six-foot-two, 286 lb Valkyrie, “inspired by a female first responder wearing body armor” brings 44 degrees of American freedom to the fight. Team Valkyrie is playing the long game, claiming they’re focused on next year’s final challenge rather than victory today. Is it sandbagging? We’ll see.”
Keith’s note: Well the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials 2013 event is over. According to DARPA “The Trials will provide a baseline on the current state of robotics and determine which teams will continue on to the DRC Finals in 2014 with continued DARPA funding. Competing in the 2014 Finals will lead to one team winning a $2 million prize.”
NASA JSC’s Valkyrie is in a three-way tie for last place in the competition. So you have to wonder if DARPA will give her another chance. Yes “her” since that is how JSC folks refer to her in addition to calling her “Val”. The robot was given an overt female personality despite direction from NASA HQ to JSC that directed them to make it gender neutral.
NASA JSC had planned to put a Valkyrie website online at http://val.jsc.nasa.gov/. For a day or so a placeholder page said “coming soon” but was then quickly pulled offline. JSC has spent $3 million in NASA funds (so far) and constructed the robot in secret. NASA JSC PAO as not put anything online about this robot. Indeed, they have been very calculating in their secrecy and media avoidance on this project. And they continue to behave this way. No media advisories, press releases – just exclusive access to one publication – and then no access for anyone else. I wonder if they will even admit that they are in last place?
As such, it is unlikely that we will learn much of anything about this robot – starting with why it did so badly in the competition and whether NASA is going to spend more money on this robot.
NASA JPL had a robot entry too (image on left)- Robosimian and it placed 5th. JPL was much more open (albeit low key) about their entry – even showing earlier versions while JSC involked full secrecy.
Keith’s update: There is a Twitter account (apparently official) at @NASAValkyrie with pictures that NASA JSC PAO has otherwise refused to publish or distribute.
– Japanese Humanoid Robot Dominates DARPA Challenge, Live Science
– Lockheed Martin Team Moves Forward In “Elite Eight” Following DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials
– No One is in the Driver’s Seat at NASA, earlier post
– NASA JSC Has Developed A Girl Robot in Secret (Revised With NASA Responses), earlier post, earlier post
A ZERO?? The NASA JSC robot scored a ZERO after spending $3 million??
NASA PAO will probably spin it (if they ever publicly admit to ever participating in the competition) that the engineers learned a lot doing this exercise.
Here’s what they really should have learned: Let the Japanese build your robots for you. You stink at it!
“NASA PAO will probably spin it that the engineers learned a lot doing this exercise.”
ABSOLUTELY! Because this is true.
You learn by doing.
And then they share what they have learned with …. no one.
But it doesn’t look like they’ve done much doing with Valkyrie. Maybe they would have gotten a point or two if they’d focused less on appearance and more on function.
All the other contenders were clearly built for experimentation, testing, modification, repairs, and more experimentation. Valkyrie (and Robonaut) was built to look impressive in photos, and to slavishly mimic the human form, whether or not it actually benefitted its function.
Style over Substance will fail most of the time. Looks great, but could not perform a single task. zero points.
I agree. NASA’s most impressive robot is Curiosity with its lander system. They don’t look human. And why should they?
That about sums up NASA, spend $3 million to win $2 million.
NASA JSC also has 50 full time employees working on Valkyrie yet they were trounced by a bunch of collage dropouts.
So the total project budget is….?
We may never know but Jonathan A. Goff’s comment above is probably in the ballpark of about ten million a year which is around what the whole Darpa Robotics Challenge will cost. It’s obvious to me that these sort of competitive prize’s that push forward technology should be used much more than they currently are. I honestly think that a civilian darpa without the d could be hugely beneficial to the country.
Maybe we need a Department of Science and Technology. Currently R&D is rather fragmented, between NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE, NASA, etc.
To be clear, if NASA had 50 FTEs on the project as stated below, there’s no way this only cost $3M. The burdened rate for an FTE in Houston is likely in the $150-200k/yr range, meaning that they spent over $10M on this if properly accounted. This is the same sort of sleight of hand they use to claim that Morpheus, with 60-100FTEs only cost $5M.
Sorry, it’s a pet peeve of mine. You can’t make accurate comparisons with industry efforts if you don’t include the burdened labor costs, which are typically over half the cost of a technology project.
~Jon
The problem is that NASA has such meager official funds for technology development that everybody lowballs funding. If a funding source is actually announced there is so much competition for it only those with the inside track will get it. So even inside NASA the only way to succeed with R&D is to circumvent the system.
Thus distorting the system further ? Isnt it more beneficial in the long run to go through the correct tech development track ( dunno if its called OCT or STP ) and compete for other key tech development funds ? And if it becomes apparent that there is a lot of critical technology that needs to be developed because of a zillion applications, make the right calls and rebalance the overall budget lines ?
Circumventing the system damages the system and opens it even wider for flops and criticism.
They think they have a prisoners dilemma, dont they, every group out on their own for short term goals ?
I certainly agree that going through a normal review process is better than nothing; at least each researcher has a chance to say his piece, even if the total awards available aren’t enough to fund even the most qualified and economical projects with $100K or so. But that begs the question; how is a much more expensive project like this approved? Although even it is dwarfed to insignificance by SLS.
By the same token, is the FT part of your FTE claim actually known to be true for all of the participants? You can’t claim the full burdened cost for someone who was also working on one or more other program/projects during the time period in question, no matter how they may have charged their time.
Steve,
I wasn’t the source on the original 50 FTE claim, so I don’t know the details. Sometimes 50FTEs means 50 people, whether or not full time. Sometimes it means the equivalent of 50 full-time people (so 100 people 1/2time or something similar). But any way you slice it, unless these guys were just working over their lunch break, it’s really likely that $3M did not included burdened labor.
~Jon
I think NASA should do more stuff like this. Robots are cool.
So, it didn’t work. So? Failure is the price of success.
Horray for JSC for trying.
“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives
valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is
not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive
to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who
spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the
triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least
he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with
those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
–Theodore Roosevelt
I’m just fine with what you said – but how do you explain NASA PAO’s refusal to inform the public about this? Its like PAO is trying to hide everything in case the news isn’t bad and then only let good news (if any) get out. Sounds rather cowardly to me.
I don’t know what the cure for NASA’s PAO problems is, but it needs to be found. You would think that a properly functioning PAO would raise the status of NASA in the public eye and would work hard to get the word out about work being done there.
When I first went to NASA GRC, I was astounded to find out about so much going on there, so much that was not publicized but yet would likely be found very interesting by the public, local schools, and so on. It was a veritable information black hole with the event horizon being the center’s perimeter.
I just read through an article in hopes of finding out what it means. Maybe I missed it.
What does PAO stand for???
May I suggest that if you want to communicate with the uninformed public that you use less acronyms.
Clueless public
Merry Christmas Keith 🙂
Lol Me and Clem
Public Affairs Office, although NASA’s is officially called the Office of Public Affairs. I believe each center also has a Public Affairs Officer.
Thank you Sir
The design was ambitious for sure. I read the JSC robot had more degrees of freedom than any other entry. The IEEE video also indicates that the robot runs off of its own battery power. I know the Atlas robot used by many of the other teams requires wall power; not really practical for disaster response! It looks like the JSC team didn’t have enough time to get the standard kinks out of the controls software, or maybe they just had a bad few days. It happens. The hardware looks very capable. I hope to see more from this robot in the coming months.
The degrees of freedom and shiny finish never made useful robots. Hardware “looks very capable” ? You can tell that by the covering plastic ?
The problem for JSC here is coming out a few days before the compo with hyperbolic headlines like “NASA superhero robot” that will “save us from disaster” and “destined for space exploration”
Its a major PR flop, not a technical flop.
Although, i bet that the reason why it failed is that JSC crew forgot to bring their prime contractor along ( GM again ? ), i.e. the guys that can actually hold screwdrivers and soldering irons for them.
I’m sorry, if you think GM is the brains behind Robonaut, you clearly have no knowledge of the situation at all. The Robonaut team is an incredibly capable and dedicated group of NASA civil servant and support contractors who do all the technical work in-house. I think it’s fair to ask for details on what happened, or whether NASA’s $3M for Valkyrie was the best use of the robotics research budget, (or whether NASA should drop a few million more on Valkyrie to let them compete next year as a self-supported team, which I suspect they’re going to do), but the Tea Party meme of “civil servants idiots/contractors geniuses” is categorically, demonstrably wrong in this case.
“NASA brought Texas A&M onto the team for the excellence in bipedal
locomotion research,” said Nicolaus Radford, Valkyrie project manager
and lead. “
@nradford on twitter :
Tough day. Team handled it well. Have lots to work through and improve on. Exhausted. Let’s do it live.
Another earler tweet, an appropriate Bruce Willis line :
http://www.youtube.com/watc… … This pretty much sums up the DRC for us right now. We’re out on a limb, but we’ll get there. We hope……
A bit more on what happened here
http://www.manufacturing.ne…
“Valkyrie tied for last place (with two other teams), scoring zero points after a bug was inadvertently introduced into the software on the day of the challenge, rendering it unable to walk. The problem was fixed by the end of the day, but not in time for the competition.”
Wish the JSC team had mentioned this sooner on a more public forum. Bad days happen to us all.
Government vs Private Industry. Consider the words of the biologist who sequenced the human genome. J. Craig Venter. This link – https://www.dropbox.com/s/x… is an excerpt from the talk show “Innovation Hub” (at 10:51 in the audio — http://blogs.wgbh.org/innov….
His work sequencing the human genome is one instance of how industry outperforms government. He first states how valuable his time was at the NIH and goes on to describe the advantages of government and private sector R&D. He finishes his response by describing how this is also playing out now in the space industry.
The performance of JSC’s Valkyrie Robot in the competition is also an example of strengths and weaknesses of R&D by government and industry. And now SLS and Orion have been out done by private industry. Culberson and others inside and outside NASA can put their blinders on and blow a lot of taxpayer money and NASA time and funds or we can take a big breath and recognize the circumstances now.
R&D in private industry is moving very fast right now. If NASA does not choose carefully, these instances like Valkyrie and SLS will continue. The same goes with CubeSats. NASA and groups outside are developing CubeSats. If NASA doesn’t tackle the potential of Nanosat technology aggressively, private ventures will leave NASA in the dust. There is good cutting edge NASA Nanosat work being done but it is underfunded and lacking sufficient organization.
In the case of Venter, SpaceX, Bigelow, they built their private concerns on the earlier work of government research. Each ran with some good ideas and did it faster and better. NASA despite the situation involving human space flight and heavy lift vehicles has contributed great R&D for private sector to capitalize. The engineers in Houston, Huntsville, Cleveland, the Cape, and elsewhere need to be retained and just put to tasks that are really cutting edge.
You should note that there is good research done by the government, too. The DOE, NIST, and other agencies have done some amazing scientific research, so throwing blanket statements about the ineffectiveness of government research is inaccurate at best. NIST has created the world’s most stable atomic clock able to keep accurate time for a duration on the order of the age of the universe. The NIF at LNL generated excess energy in a recent test, a huge step in the work toward developing a sustainable fusion reaction. That’s only two of many such developments.
Valkyrie apparently hasn’t faired well, but that doesn’t mean all government research can be painted with the same brush.
Meanwhile it’s getting easier to count the number of companies doing research, especially as companies dump labs.
As his response on audio states, Dr Venter does not dismiss government research . And I do not either. I have supported government researchers that have produced excellent work and explored other worlds. Let’s take from a familiar line- Build space probes to go “where no one has gone before”. Look down on Earth with state of the art instruments and the best researchers analyzing results. If Wolf or Culberson love NASA and want to use American taxpayer money wisely, two HEOMD projects stand on the way of going back to the Moon and going to Europa. NASA spent $5 Million for Valkyrie and they got burned by industry and universities in a competition. Likewise, $5 Billlion and probably more on the order of $50 Billion shall be burned if the HEOMD projects continue.
You think Valkyrie is disgraceful? Wait until SLS starts launching at a cost of $4000/lb to orbit while Falcon Heavy is launching at $1000/lb. The $4000/lb is optimistic. Without tricky accounting, it will be somewhere between $4K and $10K. At about the time SLS completes its Critical Design Review, the maiden flight of Falcon Heavy will take place at Vandenberg. Give Houston and Huntsville something cutting edge to do.
Contrast the JSC Valkyrie with the JPL RoboSimian. A much less glamorous design, highly modular limbs attached to a central box, and it scored in the top five. Stick on a dextrous hand somewhere and it’ll be able to do anything Valkyrie can (theoretically) do, except maybe superhero poses.
That has nothing to do with my point. Besides, as someone else has said, we don’t know what the JPL goals for the contest were or where they are in the development of their robot. As such, at this point comparisons are pretty pointless.
I agree. The JSC robot seems designed for PR.
I agree. Private industry doesn’t do much research that doesn’t have an immediate payoff. There is even some good work at NASA, unfortunately it’s a mixed bag as there’s only process in NASA evaluation of proposals, there’s no room for judgment.
The #2 finisher was IHMC, or the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition. They work closely with NASA, and were founded by Ken Ford who cut his technical teeth on information technology at Ames. Ken recently served as Chairman of NAC. Former astronaut Tom Jones is involved with them, as well. Congrats to the IHMC team!
http://www.youtube.com/watc…
At about 5:21. What do you think?
“Tea Party meme of “civil servants idiots/contractors geniuses” is categorically, demonstrably wrong in this case”. So true and like you I am just tired of hearing the complaining with no alternative except cut, cut, cut.
Landis is spot-on. Failure is part of learning. Good thing those early rockets all flew straight and true…
While I think this shows some people at NASA are learning, it certainly shows JSC’s meager technological abilities at present. This is the result of too much focus on ops and no focus on engineering for the last couple of decades.
Since JSC has published almost nothing useful about this project we are reduced to making unsupported assumptions, and that, I would say, makes all of our comments of very limited value.
We don’t know what JCS’s goals were/are with respect to this program. It’s possible that they are in the contest solely in the hope of getting money out of DARPA and don’t really care about their placement in the competition, because it doesn’t relate to or support their actual goals, whatever they are.
If their reluctance to provide information is related to their actual program goals then that would be interesting, and would explain their reticence. It makes me wonder if there is a military connection, and is it perhaps ITAR that is at the heart of the tight-lipped attitude. We may never know.
and is it perhaps ITAR that is at the heart of the tight-lipped attitude.
Maybe. We certainly don’t want the Japanese to learn our robot building secrets.
Thats hilarious.
Especially if you know what most of the industrial robotics industry technology base looks like and where it comes from, for example.
For an agency that can barely afford to fly flagship science and human exploration missions anymore, it sure seems the centers have plenty of cool pet projects to fund. The top line of NASA’s $17 billion budget is impressive; if only the agency had both strong leadership and the means to coordinate its entire workforce toward strategic goals. It seems that so much of what NASA does in uncoordinated and less than the sum of its parts.
This situation is common in industry as well. It’s always easier to get $100.00 for a proposed project than it is to get $1,000.00 for a more extensive project, even when the potential return on the larger project is proportionally greater. And, of course, the $100.00 allocations add up pretty quickly.
Experience has shown that this multidisciplinary experience will serve the U.S. well into the future for those actively participating. Only those individuals know whether they did their best, regardless of the points scored.
Landis’ citation of The Man in the Arena was well played, but in this demanding environment, lets add:
“…..in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.”
—-
Strategic goals do not happen when a very inefficient architecture is consuming the budget. The goals are simply cast aside and rearranged to fit the architecture into one legged stools. NASA and its community has many strong (and developing) leaders.
While NASA’s community is very talented, it difficult to make paper landers, habitats, rovers, EP, and depots (to name but a few things) needed for long term exploration within a budget that also can meet the demanding environment of space. The uncoordinated part has no oars, err…no funding 🙂
Let’s hope for a Happy New Year (for the benefit of all)! It’s quite the exciting future.
Notice that SCHAFT is just LEGS / ARMS / HANDS… it’s all business. No time wasted on humanoid PR. In the end, SCHAFT actually looks cooler because you realize that its “look” is the look of a closer-to-sci-fi general purpose robot.
Did any of the robots successfully get into the car on their own? Could only find video on the driving bit.
In all fairness, I don’t think we can characterize the humanoid approach as time wasted. No doubt looking “cooler” will have some effect on the judging, whether consciously or not, but I would hope that entrants will be evaluated according to the stated goals, as summed up by the following excerpt from their web site — http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/about:
“How Will DARPA Characterize Success in the DRC?
Because disasters are so unpredictable in their manifestation and effects, the type of robots DARPA envisions to aid in these situations must be adaptable and require four key capabilities to be effective:
• Mobility and dexterity to maneuver in the degraded environments typical of disaster zones;
• Ability to manipulate and use a diverse assortment of tools designed for humans;
• Ability to be operated by humans who have had little to no robotics training;
• Partial autonomy in task-level decision-making based on operator commands and sensor inputs.
The DRC Trials will test all of these capabilities, but primarily mobility, manipulation, and dexterity. The DRC Finals will be a more robust and demanding test of all four capabilities.”
Although it doesn’t say anything explicitly about humanform robots, the first two required capabilities, and to a lesser extent the last two, clearly suggest that a humanform approach would be logical and would prevent a lot of reinventing of the wheel. We can directly study and analyze how a human does these things — using a body that has been selectively evolving for millions of years — and emulate those actions, along with the human-machine interfaces that already exist. This would also be advantageous from a DARPA perspective because the different contestants who took a humanform approach would be generating hardware, software and knowledge that was conceptually compatible, resulting in considerable potential synergy.
In the long run, there will certainly be robots of multiple types, each optimized for a set of functions, just like today we have both autonomous floor sweepers and factory floor welders, both robots, both optimized for their function(s), but very different in form and concept. Similarly, although I see an advantage in humanform robots, there will always be requirements for robots that move by way of treads or other non-human-like means. And no doubt there will be robots that are combinations of the various “types” we see and envision now, each developed first and then combined later.
Who’s the robo-hit who dominates the fem-bot miss?
Schaft!
D-mn right.
I hear Schaft is a bad motherboard…
Shut your mouth!
I’m just talkin bout Schaft!
We can dig it.
So tired of this joke.
Short answer –
JPL is a NASA robotics spaceflight lab that scored 14 with a robot that is mimicking an animal good at climbing rather than a more generalist human frame.
JSC is a NASA human spaceflight lab that built the most humanoid robot in the competition, with some clever design elements, and came in tied for last.
I suspect that winning was not the key goal of JSC so much as getting a Robnaut-style project quietly done without a lot of budget or regulatory overhead. That probably accounts for part of the secrecy.
This is Monday morning quarterbacking at its best. If anyone wants to read some commentary from the TRIALS (not finals, it’s only halftime, folks) from someone who knows a thing or two about robotics, here you go:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/au…
Many of the robots at the Trials were built to do individual tasks in an isolated, very structured, competition. If you really look at the end Global vision for this machine, and you look at the potential for Valkyrie, you may consider stepping over to the other side of the line most of you have drawn.
NASA was founded on an open ended vision of achieving the impossible. If we as a Nation didn’t protect, encourage, and empower the entrepreneurial spirit of the engineers on the ground during Apollo, and instead criticized their attempts, would they have been able to achieve what they did? Attack PAO and management all you want, the system is indeed broken, but please take the time to praise the calculated risk taking of the handful of inventors who are still trying to keep original spirit of NASA alive.
I think thats the most strange usage of the phrase “entrepreneurial spirit” that i have come across.
“Many of the robots at the Trials were built to do individual tasks in an isolated, very structured, competition. If you really look at the end Global vision for this machine, …“
That’s the part of this competition that has me confused. From DARPA’s perspective (and it is their competition) I would have thought that the two main goals would have been: 1) seeing which concepts work well and which ones don’t (taking implementation methods into account); and 2) seeing which viable concepts can be combined in a single robot.
The idea of optimizing a robot for a particular task seems to me to be counterproductive to the goals of this competition, and is rather simply a continuation of what robotics developers have mostly been doing to date.
I thought the DARPA idea of emphasizing robots that could operate in human environments, using human tools and interface mechanisms, was a major step forward. Like computers and so much else before them, until robots become much more general purpose in function, and more modular in construction and maintenance, the prices will stay too high and multiple “tools” (in this case robots) will be required to give the ability to do all of the tasks in a single job. Using those functional aspects of the human body and world that have evolved over millions of years to satisfy the same criteria only makes sense.
Using robotics in the real world is not like a football game, where you can swap out offensive players for defensive players when there are sudden changes in the game or the field. Once you have a robot in place on a job, you’d want it to be able to do everything requiring (or benefiting from) a robotic solution, not be stuck with half a dozen expensive robots getting in each other’s way.
Perhaps I’m seeing this in the wrong light, but it appears to me that how they’re awarding points — for how well these robots perform certain predefined tasks — is not consistent with their goals for sponsoring this competition.
I’m with you. The way the Trials were organized doesn’t align with the larger vision. I suppose they had a hard time figuring out how to make a halfway point competition that wasn’t too hard but still representative of the type of tasks the teams will see at the Finals.
From what I’ve read and heard, the Finals will be a real disaster environment where all of the assigned tasks are pre-existing within the environment. The focus will be on speed and seamless operation in an environment designed for humans. Atlas couldn’t even fit in the vehicle, and none of the other robots had the capability to move from task to task on their own.
Val was also the only robot that could operate un-tethered to power. I’m guessing that will be a huge part of the redesign the other teams will have to take on in the next year.
Perhaps the Finals will make their thinking clear; one would think that DARPA knows what it’s doing. But it sure appears, to me at least, that the jump from Trials to Finals is much too big, especially taking into account what you’ve said about a disaster environment. Perhaps money is a limiting factor, but I think this should have been more of a multi-stage progression in capability development and demonstration. As it is, I don’t think it’s going to give them what they want.
The comments on here are ridiculous. Other than the very valid PAO criticisms I don’t think there’s been enough information about JSC’s robot, the competition it had, or the actual contest to make any of the snap judgements about “waste” or “trounced by college dropouts” that I see here.
Just how are you able to determine who went to college and who did not? Just wondering.
That was part of my point. Lots of assumptions being flung around.
In other words you have no idea eaither. Just checking.
Not sure where this is coming from but I didn’t originate the college comment, just responding to it and many others that are full of assumptions.
Note that the robots are still teleoperated to a large degree. I would have thought that NASA has tons of experience in this field, http://blog.a9t9.com/2013/1…
A paste from DARPA: DARPA seeks to accomplish this by creating and providing government-furnished equipment (GFE) to some DRC participants in the form of a robotic hardware platform with arms, legs, torso and head.
I wonder if NASA received one of these. So Val. was a kit? NASA may not have done all of the work.
No, actually Val was the only robot that was designed and built from scratch in 12 months.
There were track A and track b teams. Track A teams were responsible for hardware and software, Track B teams competed virtually until they received an “Atlas” robot from DARPA. The other teams showcased 6-10 years of development at the Trials.
Depends on how you measure.
Many of the actual robots, i mean hardware, for track A teams were purpose built for the trials, in similar timeframes. The claim that JSC was the only one to build one is not true.
Heck, ROBOTIS sponsored Thor-OP could not even have existed a year ago as the Dynamixel Pro servos were not a product yet ! It’s making is fairly well documented across Robotis community websites.
What is true is that most of the teams coming into the competition came with years and years of experience of building similar hardware and software. Although, that should apply to JSC and Robonaut, too.
This is wrong. Multiple entries were designed and built from scratch in 12 months. And Val used a lot of design heritage from Robonaut 1 and 2
Excuse me, Val was the only biped that was present and built from scratch. JPL and CMU also built new robots, neither were biped and both will require significant redesign to be competitive in the Finals.
Beyond being white & gold, and in humanoid form, how was the technical design taken from Robonaut?
Again, you are wrong and keep spreading misinformation. THOR-OP was most certainly built from scratch and is a full biped. Like i said, even its servos did not exist a year ago.
SCHAFT was also built for the competition, even though its based on previous years of work.
CHIMP was also pretty much built from scratch.
I don’t understand why a robot should be a biped. Humans are bipeds only because we started out as quadripeds and then spent time in the trees. A centauroid form (four wheels or legs and two manipulators) would be more stable.
The bipedalism in itself is not important; rather it is a consequence of the front legs becoming arms terminating in dexterous hands, Evolution of the hands made tool use possible, and the opposable thumb, in particular, is often quoted as separating humans from animals. If hands and thumbs are an effective interface for humans, then they should be for robots as well, and robots using interfaces made for humans appears to be part of what the competition is looking for.
How the robot gets from A to B and remains stable is a whole other issue. Two legs and feet may not be the best for working in a rescue situation, which again seems to be part of the competition requirements, but if the robots are to be employing mobile tools made for humans, we know that legs and feet will work, and there aren’t really any other alternatives for ladder climbing except for going hand-over-hand monkey-style, which takes away the hands, the most valuable tool-using asset.
THOR-OP shared quite a bit with SAFFiR, not quite built from scratch.
Dont make stuff up, there is not a single bolt of hardware shared between SAFFIR and Thor-OP.
Virginia Tech brought the experience, and built a iteration of their ideas with help of ROBOTIS
This is just one more example of how NASA is stuck in antiquated Buck Rogers mentality of space exploration and robotics. Take a look at Schaft Robotics that won the competition. It’s not a humanoid analogy like Val…it’s a machine built to complete tasks. C’mon NASA….0 points in this competition shows you haven’y a clue and are stuck on an old fashioned humanoid mentality. You want to go to Mars and get some real science?…..call Schaft.
Note that the competition is not done, so nothing is won. That was clearly stated in a link in the Comments section.
Wrong, something was won. First 8 teams will be sponsored by DARPA to the tune of 1 million each, pending contract signing. For an average six-man team thats a pretty nice small win.
That’s not the ultimate victory, though, is it? The competition is not complete.
Winning the DRC finals is not the ultimate victory either, even bringing this technology to real world usage is just on the road to ultimate win.
Saying that “nothing was won” is wrong, apart from $1M awards here all the winning teams will have much higher chance of getting sponsorships and further careers in that technology technology sector.
If you review the specs of Robonaut, I think you’ll find the hardware is world class, versatile and robust. Based on the performance in the interim competition, the software wasn’t fully complete & validated (no pun intended). The failures are more associated with software program management than anything else in my opinion. Luckily, there’s more time for them to iron things out before the finals. I wish them success.
But now you are reading NASA Watch again! Welcome back!
Good to hear from you mickey lol
How is Minnie doing?
Goofy drop by lately??
I’d say that Mickey is goofy enough all by himself.
I think its good that NASA competes with the private sector. They are obliviously still not competitive but I’m hoping that will shake the structure. Beating Google is obliviously an impossible feat (I’m sure their need gen. will be quantum and able to teletransport) but if NASA can get a couple of points at the next competition, it will be progress.
NASA-JSC SCORE 0. why I’m not surprise. The only time NASA can claim victory is when no outside independent verification can be done.