- In a jam?
Never fear!
Robots are on the way.
(energetic techno music)
You might remember from a previous Forward Thinking episode,
we talked with Henrik Christensen,
a robotics expert at Georgia Tech.
And he mentioned the Robotics Challenge.
Well, it recently concluded out in California.
So, you're probably wondering what happened?
How did the robots do?
First, I need to explain where the challenge came from.
It was actually inspired by a real world event.
When the Fukushima Nuclear Facility in Japan
was hit by a tsunami, it suffered a meltdown in three
of its six nuclear reactors,
which created an incredibly dangerous situation
for emergency responders to go into.
So DARPA proposed a challenge:
Create a robot capable of responding
to an emergency situation on its own.
Now, the benefits of using a robot are obvious.
For one thing, you can send them into situations
that would be dangerous or even deadly to humans,
and they might not even suffer a scratch.
They could potentially save thousands or millions
of lives in the process.
But, while robots find hazardous conditions a breeze,
other things can be really difficult.
Like opening a door.
So the robots challenge was a series of eight tasks,
meant to simulate responding to an emergency situation.
And here they are.
The robot had to drive a vehicle to a destination,
had to get out of the vehicle.
It then had to open up a door and walk through a doorway.
Then it had to turn a valve 360 degrees counter-clockwise.
After that, it had to pick up an electric power drill
and cut a predetermined shape out of a wall.
And it had to do a surprise task,
that wasn't revealed until the day of competition.
For example, picking up a cable and plugging it into a wall.
Then it had to walk through a field of debris,
and finally, climb a set of stairs.
Now, the teams only had one hour for their robot
to complete all of these tasks.
And the robots could be autonomous,
they could be remote-controlled,
or they could be some combination of both.
To simulate a real emergency situation,
DARPA also hampered communications,
making a delay between when you could send
and receive information with your robot.
So, out of those 23 teams that competed,
only three were able to complete all eight tasks
in under an hour.
The winning team was from South Korea,
and their robot completed all the tasks
in 44 minutes, 28 seconds.
Now, all the robots found certain challenges
really tough to do.
Like, using that electric drill,
or opening a door.
This really illustrates that things that the average human
finds easy are still really tough to solve in robotics.
For example, I can tell how far away my hand is
from a doorknob, so opening a door is not
hard at all for me.
I also know how to shift my balance
when getting out of a vehicle.
So that's pretty easy, too.
But with robots, the story's completely different.
And if you search online, you're gonna find
tons of videos and GIFs of these robots toppling over,
or collapsing for no apparent reason.
And you might laugh or you might cringe,
but, personally, I actually find all of it inspiring,
because I see how the engineers and scientists
are getting together to look at these challenges
and how to overcome them.
And this is how progress happens.
So who knows, the next first responder
might actually be a robot,
and that's pretty cool.
But I've got a question for you guys this week.
Does this robotics challenge ease your mind about
a potential robotic uprising when a robot
can't even open a door?
Or, if you were to design a robot for the challenge,
what would it look like?
I wanna hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Thank you, Toyota, for sponsoring our show.
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(upbeat techno music)