June 3, 2022 • 37 mins
What did the teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge have to do? Who won? And what does this mean for the future of robotics?
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, John Than Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and Hell
the Tech Area. It is time for a tech Stuff
classic episode. This episode originally published June two thousand fifteen.
(00:28):
It is titled DARPA Robotics Challenge Review. It's about the
DARPA Robotics Challenge where they were simulating UH an emergency
situation and putting a robot through paces of doing certain
basic tasks in an effort to see if the robots
could do them, you know, more or less autonomously. Turns
(00:51):
out that some things that you might think of as
being incredibly easy to accomplish turned out to be pretty hard.
Let's listen in So, to start off, we got to
talk about DARPA itself. Remember that's the research and development
arm of the Department of Defenses technically the US Defense
(01:11):
Advanced Research Projects Agency UH and DARPA has been responsible
for a lot of cutting edge research, largely in the
mode of military use. But we have seen the benefits
of that research hit us in other ways. Besides, you know,
the military applications, So for example, our pa net, the
(01:35):
predecessor to the Internet, was the platform upon which the
technologies that allow the Internet to work were developed. And
that was a DARPA project that was back when they
were first just called ARPA rather than DARPA. But we
wouldn't have the Internet, at least not the way we
have it today if it were not for this agency.
(01:57):
So the agency has done a lot of stuff that
has benefited us in many ways. I'll talk about another
one a little bit later on in the podcast, kind
of draw parallels to what happened with the robotics challenge.
So here we have this agency. They're all about research
and development. They don't actually have lots of labs with
(02:17):
scientists working in them. Know what this agency does is
it sends out proposals to other groups and asks them
to help work on various projects. Sometimes they hold challenges.
In these challenges, it's kind of an open invitation for
any group that can participate to uh to compete in
(02:40):
some way, and the winner usually gets some sort of
cash prize. And so often the cash prize will be
less than the investment needed to actually participate in the
competition to build out the thing that you need to
make for us to to win, but it's still a
very important UH and prestigious event to be part of
(03:03):
if you are capable of competing. Now we're talking mostly
about research departments engineering departments in universities, but there are
also some private institutions, not just university type things, but
actual research and development labs that will participate in DARPA
projects as well. And it's collectively that these teams were
(03:26):
kind of they're the ones that are pushing the technology forward,
and DARK is kind of the facilitator. They're offering up
the possibility for people to actually UH participate, and not
only the possibility, but the goals. They define the goals
that have to be met, and as it turns out,
defining those goals is a very important part of these
(03:48):
challenges because you have to tell the engineers what it
is they need to be able to do before they
can build the stuff that does it. If if you
have a very vague description of what needs to be done,
the possibilities of achieving it are so varied that it
(04:08):
can often paralyze a project nothing gets done. But if
you make it very specific, then it narrows down the
options and it gives more focus to the project. So
the DARPA Robotics project itself was inspired by a real
world disaster, specifically the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Now, this
(04:32):
was the nuclear facility, the nuclear reactor that was flooded
and then suffered some massive problems because of damage to
the infrastructure. And we're talking about a nuclear facility, Radiation
is a factor, so it's a very dangerous environment to
(04:55):
send responders to. Dark As approach was to create a
scenario in which a robot would need to go through
an environment similar to that that was at Fukushima and
be able to perform the tasks necessary to help avert
true devastation and catastrophe without putting people at risk. So
(05:20):
the idea is that you can use a robot which
is not going to respond to radiation the way a
living organism would and be able to actually carry out
the stuff you need to prevent a really huge problem
from getting worse. So uh, some people have referred to
(05:41):
the Darker Robotics Challenge as the Robolympics because it was
a series of tasks that a robot has to complete
and it had to all be the same. Robot teams
could not build individual robots designed to complete specific tasks.
If they could, it would be way easier of a
challenge because most of the robots that are in use
(06:03):
today have very narrow parameters. There's just maybe a single task,
or perhaps just a couple of small, you know, a
small range of tasks that the robot has to do.
It doesn't have to do anything outside of that. So
when you're designing the robot, you just say, all right,
what design elements will allow the robot to do what
(06:24):
it has to do. Anything that's outside of that is unnecessary,
we will not do it. Take the roomba as an example.
It's a great example. It's a robot the vacuums that
cleans floors. Anything that's not necessary for the roombot to
do that is put aside. You'd want to make sure
that all the design elements in your robot complement its purpose.
(06:47):
But if you have to complete a lot of different tasks,
and those tasks are not always similar to one another,
you complicate the whole design process by incredible factors. It's
hard to even express how much more difficult this is. Now,
(07:08):
if you've watched any of the videos that came out
of the Darker Robotics Challenge. You probably saw at least
one or two that were montages of robots falling over
and it's a little funny to watch. You see these
big robots just topple over sometimes apparently for no reason.
They just they just they're standing and then they collapse.
(07:31):
And there's something comic about that, you know that you
can't deny that it's funny, but it also demonstrates that
these robots are trying to do something that while we
as human beings might find easy, it's a real challenge
from a robotics standpoint. So this Darker Robotics Challenge had
three phases. The first one was a virtual challenge, which
(07:56):
in which teams were to design software that would allow
a virtual robot to complete um certain tasks within a
virtual environment. So there were no real robotics here, but
it was a test to see if if the teams
could actually build the software necessary to make the robot
do the tasks that needed to be done. The next
(08:20):
had a trial where it was a physical trial where
teams actually had to uh place a real robot through
to you know, go to the next level. And then
you had the finals, which were the ones that have
happened most recently. Uh, and I'll go through each of
the tasks that they had to do in just a second.
(08:40):
If we look back at the Virtual challenge, there were
twenty six teams that were part of it to build
that software. The robot they were controlling was a virtual
Atlas robot, which is a humanoid robot and was a
popular choice for a lot of the teams. When they
moved on to the more physical trials, they still would
(09:02):
use the Atlas robots. The the challenge, by the way,
did not require the teams to build their own robots
from scratch. They could use pre existing robots, but they
had to program them so that they could complete the
necessary tasks. So not every robot out there would have
been a good fit for this. Let's go back to
the Roomba. The roombo would have been a terrible choice
to enter into the Darbo Robotics Challenge. We'll be back
(09:26):
with more of this classic episode of tech Stuff after
this quick break. So, uh, here are some of the
virtual tasks that the virtual robots had to complete using
this software. They had to walk through an area of
(09:48):
uneven ground that had debris included there, so simulated debris
had to have a software that would allow the robot
to maintain its balance even while tracking a path to
a specific destination. Through this this uneven terrain, they had
to attach a hose to a spigot and turn a valve. Uh.
(10:09):
They also were given some artificial limits because and an
emergency situation, you cannot always count on your communication lines
being perfectly sound, such as that the Fukushima disaster. You
need to be sure that your robot can contend with
the fact that there might be lag between when you
(10:31):
can issue a command and when the robot is ready
for the next command. UH. That meant that some of
the teams started to really look at ways to create
a semi autonomous robot. So some of the teams built
robots that were capable of taking on some tasks autonomously. UH.
(10:51):
Some teams avoided that entirely. They focused on using the
robots as a direct extension of the control roles that
the humans were behind. So, in other words, you might
think of those robots as enormous technological puppets. The puppets
would respond to direct human commands and wouldn't be able
(11:14):
to do anything on their own. They didn't have any autonomy.
There are other ones that you know, you could have
semi autonomy in the show it a set of stairs
and you send it the command to climb those stairs,
and it could do the rest. It could calculate how
high it needed to put its feet and how to
shift its weight, that sort of stuff. UH, And there
were a lot of different strategies employed and to varying
(11:36):
degrees of success. It wasn't like the autonomous robots automatically
were better than the human controlled or vice versa. There
was actually it all depended on the implementation. So that
virtual trial ended up having one team winning pretty pretty decisively. UM.
(11:58):
It was the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, which
is UH, an organization in Pensacola, Florida, and eight other
teams qualified for the trials that we're going to be
held in December. Now, by the time those trials happened,
some of the teams had merged UH and some other
(12:22):
teams were coming into it. Six of the teams would
go on to compete at the trials that were held
at the Homestead Miami Speedway, and they had eight tasks
they had to complete that were similar to the ones
in the Darker robotics final, and those tasks included manning
a vehicle, um walking through uneven terrain, or otherwise moving
(12:45):
through uneven terrain. Robots did not have to be bipedal.
They could move around on however many limbs they had.
They just had to be also able to do these
other tasks. Uh. They had to be able to climb
a ladder. They had to be able to remove debris
from a door and then opened the door. They had
to be able to break through a wall. Uh, they
had to be able to handle valves and to attach
(13:07):
a hose to a spigott. The winning team of that
set of trials was a group called Shaft spelled s
C H A f T. This was a group out
of Japan. Now, when this group was competing, they were
this little independent group. But then they got acquired by
(13:28):
a little company that we've talked about several times on
this podcast. You know him. You may or may not
love them Google. So just before the trials, Google had
acquired uh, this this this group, this organization. Now Shaft
did really well, uh, which you know makes sense. I mean,
you've you've heard the theme song. But out of thirty
(13:50):
two points that it could possibly score. It earned twenty seven,
so pretty good score for for a robot and also
was seven points more than the next closest competitor, which
was from I H M C, the same group that
won the virtual trial earlier. Third place was Tartan Rescue
(14:13):
from Carnegie Mellon And that will be important in a
second to when we get into the finals. Now, Shaft
did not go on to compete in the DARPA Robotics
Finals because Google announced that they were refocusing the team,
dedicating it to actual commercial Google projects. So uh, they
(14:35):
were no longer being dedicated to this challenge. They were
being dedicated to a real world product of some sort.
Google's also had other involvement with some DARPA stuff, at
least after the fact. Google does not tend to get
involved in these challenges directly. Um, probably because of the
(14:57):
military association of DARPA and Google is very careful to
avoid those kind of associations. Now, the finals took place
over June five and June six and Pomona, California, and uh,
it was at the Fair Plex and there was quite
a crowd watching these events, and the reports I read
(15:20):
were really interesting, and also the videos I watched were
interesting because the crowd was extremely enthusiastic cheering on the robots,
groaning every time a robot failed a task or fell over,
gasping when that sort of stuff happened, because everyone wanted
to see these robots succeed. No one wanted any group
(15:40):
to fail. And uh. Also, the other interesting thing was
that it was really hard to tell if you were
in the audience when a robot was operating autonomously as
opposed to being controlled by humans. Um. That says two things,
One that the line between these two is getting further
and further blurred. And to that sometimes the robot would
(16:05):
behave in a weird way, and you couldn't be sure
if it was because the autonomous programming was lacking or
because the control mechanisms were limited. So, in other words,
it's not that necessarily that the art has gotten so
advanced that we can't tell the difference. It may be
that the art has not advanced enough that we can't
(16:26):
spot what is the cause of incompetence. And and I
use the word incompetence mainly as a joke. It's just
a joke because truthfully, it displays how difficult robotics as
a discipline actually is how how challenging it is to
design a robot that is capable of doing the same
(16:46):
sort of things that humans can do. It shows that
the things that we take for granted as being pretty
simple are fiendishly difficult when you get to a design
and programming level when you're actually building a robot that's
going to be capable of doing the same thing. So
here are the eight tasks that the robots had to complete,
(17:09):
and one of these tasks was called Surprise. I'll get
to it. But the reason it's called surprises that DARPA
told all the teams, your robot will encounter a task
similar to these other ones that you already know about,
but we're not going to tell you what it is.
And it meant that the teams knew that there was
(17:30):
going to be something on that list of tasks that
was not not defined, and that the robot would have
to be able to contend with it in order to
get a point for that particular task. And so the
tasks were um there were eight, Like I said, eight
of them. You were awarded a point if your robot
could successfully complete that task. So the score the final
(17:55):
scores once everything was done were determined by how many
tasks were completed successfully and what was the time of
the robots performance. Now, when they were first designing the robots,
teams were told they would have half an hour per task.
So you have eight tasks, half an hour per test,
that's four hours total. But the actual competition they were
(18:18):
told they would have one hour to complete all eight tests. Um.
And why you might think that, how is that fair?
As a as a bait and switch, you also have
to understand this was all about simulating an emergency response.
So under those emergency conditions, you can't expect to ask
for more time. That's not realistic. Uh. And it added
(18:41):
an extra layer of pressure on the teams. So those
eight tasks, the first one was to drive, so the
robots had to drive a Polaris Ranger XP nine vehicle.
These if you haven't seen them, they look like sometimes
you might call mcgator or you might think of it
as a golf car on steroids. These are um vehicles
(19:03):
that are similar to golf carts. They're they're largely open,
They've got heavier wheels than golf carts, do more warm
horsepower than a golf cart would, but it's definitely in
that range between golf cart and real car. Teams had
five minutes to alter the vehicle without using tools to
(19:24):
make sure that their robots could actually operate it. So
what the robots had to do was drive from the
starting point to a destination, and it was only considered
a success if the vehicle had completely moved past a
finishing mark. The vehicle also had to go through essentially
a driving course with obstacles and cones set up, and
(19:47):
it was determined that if the robot were to collide
with one of those obstacles or one of those cones
and cause it to move as a result of that collision,
the robot would not receive a point for that ask
the robot. Also, the team could choose for the robot too,
instead of driving, to walk to the destination, but in
(20:08):
that case they would not be awarded a point for
that task. They would forfeit the point um. But ideally
the robot would be able to operate the accelerator and
the steering wheel and maybe even the break and the shift.
The cars were already or the vehicles were already started,
The engines were already running, and they were already in
(20:31):
high gear. Because it was considered to be the smoothest
way for the robots to to maneuver the vehicle. But
if teams wanted to, they could design a robot that
would be capable of shifting gears. It was not a requirement,
it was just something they could do if they wanted to.
At any rate, the robot needed to be able to
(20:51):
drive safely from the starting point to the destination and
then halt the vehicle either by letting off of the
accelerators so it coasted to a stop, are actually applying
the brake. The next task. That was just task number one.
The next task was called egress, which is really just
getting out of the car. It sounds incredibly simple, and
(21:12):
for humans, for most of us, it really is pretty simple.
You know. We we intuitively know how to maintain our
balance and to shift our weight so that we go
from a seated position to standing. But that's not the
case with the robots. You have to design the robot
to do that. You have to program the robot to
do that. You know, the robot be able to anticipate
(21:34):
what a shift in its weight will do, what how
it's momentum will carry it forward. As it turns out,
This was one of the trickier tasks that teams had
to complete to get out of a vehicle. It was
not an easy thing to do um but they were
told that they could get out of the vehicle in
either direction. They didn't have to exit outll the left
(21:56):
side versus the right side. That the robot could get
out of either side, and again the task was considered
complete if the robot could get out of the vehicle
and maintain its balance and move on to the next challenge,
and if they could, it would receive a point. The
next one was door. Now egress was tough. Door was
(22:17):
surprisingly tough. You would think that opening a door would
be a pretty simple task. This was a push door
operated by a lever style handle. You had to push
up or pull you know, pull up or push down
rather on the handle and then push the door to
open it, then step through the door. The door did
not have a threshold, so there was nothing that you
(22:38):
had to step over. However, the door was a standard
thirty six inch wide doorway and with the door jam
that's closer to thirty three and a half inches, and
some of these robots were too wide to walk through
the door, you know, heading with their torso facing forward.
They actually had to turn sideways and then shuffle through
the doorway. And there were a lot of robots that
(23:01):
fell down at this stage of the the challenge. They
would lose their balance either when pushing the door or
when trying to maneuver through the doorway. One robot fell
down at this stage and was able to pick itself
back up very very slowly and deliberately, which is remarkable
(23:24):
because it's the only robot that managed to pick itself
back up after falling over, and that was the Carnegie
Melon robot, the same one we mentioned in the Trials
part in just a few moments ago. But anyway, that
was it. You just had to open the door and
walk through the doorway, and that was the end of
that task, and yet it was deceptively difficult. The next
(23:46):
one was Valve, which was not about the game company,
but rather about turning a control as if you were
turning a valve to operate a fire hose or to
shut down water to a specific part of the system,
which makes sense. In a nuclear facility, you might have
to shut off or open a valve. In that case,
(24:09):
the valve had to be turned counterclockwise in three sixty
degrees in order for the task to be complete, and
the team was only told that the valve would have
a size between four and sixteen inches in diameter, which
meant that you had to create a robot that would
be capable of gripping anything within that range and then
turning it in that counterclockwise direction three sixty degrees. Again
(24:34):
triggier than it sounds. We've got more to say in
this classic episode of tech Stuff. After these quick messages
the next step. The next task was called wall, in
which a robot had to pick up a cordless drill.
There were two of them available. They were not automatically on.
(24:57):
The robot had to operate the cordless drill and and
it on by squeezing the trigger, and use the cordless
drill to cut through some drywall in a shape that
was drawn on the drywall. The drywall was a half
inch thick, and the robot had to hold the drill,
operate the drill and move in this shape and then
(25:18):
remove the rubble. The idea being that sometimes the robot
might have to cut through a surface in order to
get access to certain controls uh that might otherwise be
blocked by collapse of a room or something along those lines.
Also pretty tricky, you know, using tools that were designed
to be held in human hands. You know, humans, we
(25:40):
we have the ability to detect how much pressure we're
using and to um to change that based upon what's happening.
Robots a little more tricky. I mean, you can have
sensors that alert the operator what's happening to what's happening,
but it's not intuitive. Again, you have to program it.
After wall was the surprise. Now, the surprise was something
(26:04):
that DARPA could change out from day to day. There
were two days of this series of challenges, and I
know that on one day, I'm not sure if this
was the same for the other day, but on one
day it involved picking up a plug and plugging it
into a socket. Uh. I think they probably changed it
for the second day, But I never could find out
(26:26):
what the surprise was on that case. But at any rate,
it also ended up being pretty tricky that I saw
one robot that attempted several times to plug the plug
into a socket and it was sad and funny at
the same time. But yeah, again, it was one of
those things where it was similar to tasks the robots
had had to do previously, but wasn't something they were
(26:49):
expressly told they would have to do during the actual challenge,
so that's what made it really hard. The next task
was rubble, in which the robot had to walk through
a debris field or on top of the debris, either
through it or on top of it. Again, very challenging
for robots to maintain their balance. There were lots of
(27:10):
you know, Boston Dynamics robots that were pretty good at
doing this, but still pretty tricky. You saw a lot
of robots fall over at this point too. And then
there were stairs that was the final task was to
climb us up stairs that had a rail on the
left side but no rail on the right side, And
once the robot was completely on the top of the stairs,
(27:32):
it was considered to have completed the task and the
course and it's time would be logged. So again, those
those tasks, for the most part, pretty simple for your
average human to do. But imagine that it's your job
to build a robot that could do all of those things.
It has to be able to have some form of perception,
(27:53):
has to be able to see either for the human
operators to pick up various two tools, or navigate through
certain areas, or for it to to see and operate
autonomously and has to be able to perceive its environment
understand depth. In fact, a lot of teams had trouble
with the the wall task because it was very hard
(28:16):
to perceive how far away the drill was from a
hand to pick it up and then use it again.
Things that are pretty easy for most of us very
hard from a robotic standpoint. Um. And like I said,
the door was one of the hardest ones. Uh. A
lot of robots had a lot of issues just walking
(28:37):
through a doorway, which is both funny and and really
does bring to light that we've got a long way
to go with robotics. Um. Well, if if you, as
someone in the crowd had said, if the robotic uprising happens,
just close the door and you'll be fine. Uh, Because
it's tricky stuff. It really shows the automation is. We
(28:59):
take a lot of it for granted because the examples
we see tend to be pretty elegant because they're designed
for a specific purpose. But as we start looking at
a more general purpose robot, we begin to understand exactly
how complicated we human beings are, so to design a
machine that can operate within our human world seamlessly is
(29:21):
an incredible challenge. So who won, Well, the first place
went to a South Korean team k A I ST.
It had its robot d d r C Hubo, which
completed all eight tasks in forty four minutes and twenty
eight seconds. Those eight tests forty four minutes and twenty
(29:43):
eight seconds, remember that's driving from one point to another
a very short distance, actually getting out of that vehicle,
walking through a doorway, cutting a hole through a wall,
turning a valve, plugging in a plug, um, walking over
some debris, and climbing some stairs. Something that would take
you know, a healthy person. If it took the more
(30:06):
than ten minutes, you would wonder what was going on.
So another example that the winning team did it in
forty four minutes and twenty eight seconds. There's also a
great preparation video for the d r C Hubo that
was put out by the South Korean team that I
loved because it was like a training montage from Rocky
(30:27):
and and they It was clear the team had a
sense of humor about this because it was showing the
robot not just complete tasks that would be similar to
the ones that were in the actual challenge, including things
like climbing a ladder or um or lifting a tool,
but also doing your typical, you know, training montage stuff
like doing push ups or taking a fighting stance like
(30:50):
you're a kung fu master, And that really tickled me.
I thought it was pretty entertaining but also very impressive
about what they were capable of doing with that robot.
The second place team was I H M C. That
Pencacle of Florida group we talked about a minute ago.
They were using the Boston Dynamics running Man Atlas butt Um.
(31:11):
It took it took about fifty minutes in twenty six
seconds to complete all eight tasks. After he did so,
after it had climbed the stairs, it lifted its arms
in victory and then fell over, So I guess that's Hubris.
The third place team was Carnegie Melon. Their team Tartan Rescue,
(31:31):
the one that had come in third place in the
trials as well. Their robot was called Chimp, which had
very long arms. Is a red robot with arms that
looked kind of freakishly long if you compare it to
a human, and it also had treads like a like
a treadmill type thing on both of its legs and
on both of its arms. And that was the robot
(31:54):
that fell over in the door challenge and was able
to right itself by itself, the only one that could
get up by itself and didn't need a team of
humans to actually lift it up. Now, those were the
only three teams that actually completed all of the eight tasks,
and they won the prizes. First place was two million dollars,
second place was one million, and third place was five thousand.
(32:15):
The other teams broke down like this. Four of them
were able to complete seven of the tasks, only one
was capable of completing just six tasks. You had two
teams that completed five, two teams that completed four, four
teams that completed three, two that completed to one that
(32:36):
completed one, and four teams weren't able to complete any
of the tasks successfully. Um. Now, the whole point of
this was to really push that state of the art forward,
to have engineers think, what would you need to do
to build a robot capable of actually responding to real
world situations? Who are the challenges that are in the
(32:59):
way of how can we advance the technology both in
the hardware and in the software to overcome these challenges.
And the goal was not to build a super robot
that's going to save the world. This is not you know,
the Avengers age of Ultron. That's not what's going on here.
It's all about incremental improvements in the art and discipline
(33:21):
of robotics so that the next generation of robots can
benefit from the research and development done in this first
generation and a good way of seeing how this plays
out in the real world, because you know, you might think, well,
that was a clever demonstration, but what what can we
expect here on our day to day lives. Take a
(33:43):
look at how autonomous cars are coming along, because of course,
DARPA held the Grand Challenge back in the mid to
late two thousand's, and that was the challenge in which
different groups tried to build self driving cars that could
complete a core whether it was on the desert or
simulated urban environment. And we are now seeing people who
(34:07):
worked on the various teams that that competed in that
DARPA Grand Challenge building what will be the first generation
of driver lest cars that will eventually make it to
the consumer market. Google has people on its team that
competed in those Grand challenges, So we're seeing that expertise
(34:30):
that was developed as as engineers were given a problem
and told find a way to solve this. We're seeing
that expertise they developed come into play in the real
world now. And it's sure it's gonna be a few
more years before we get autonomous cars as a reality
that an actual human being can go out and purchase,
(34:50):
as opposed to a representative of a company or you know,
just uh, you know, someone who is there to demonstrate
the viability of the technology. It's going to be a
few more years before this becomes something that you or
I could go to the dealership and actually purchase. But
the reality is there on the horizon. Same here with
the Darba Robotics challenge. It will likely take a decade
(35:15):
or more to develop a humanoid robot or a robot
capable of operating within a world designed by humanoids for
humanoids and do so seamlessly. It will take a lot
of time and a lot more development, but the foundation
has been laid, so I'm particularly excited to see what
(35:38):
the future holds for us based upon these results. And
while those montages of robots falling over are really funny.
I am actually optimistic about what robotics will be able
to accomplish in the future. I'm just also realistic that
it's going to take time. It's not We're not on
the verge of a terminator like future. The state of
(36:02):
the art and artificial intelligence has gotten gone very far
in certain realms of computer science, but when it comes
to robotics, there's all there are a lot of problems
that are still very difficult. You know that vision is
a big one. H and again, just being able to
maintain balance again one of those things that we take
(36:22):
for granted, really a challenging problem. I hope you enjoyed
that classic episode about the DARPA Robotics Challenge review. If
you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me
know what you're thinking, because otherwise I'll never know. The
best way to reach me is to use Twitter. The
(36:43):
show's handle is text Stuff HSW and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you
(37:03):
listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to tex Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, John Than Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and Hell
the Tech Area. It is time for a tech Stuff
classic episode. This episode originally published June two thousand fifteen.
(00:28):
It is titled DARPA Robotics Challenge Review. It's about the
DARPA Robotics Challenge where they were simulating UH an emergency
situation and putting a robot through paces of doing certain
basic tasks in an effort to see if the robots
could do them, you know, more or less autonomously. Turns
(00:51):
out that some things that you might think of as
being incredibly easy to accomplish turned out to be pretty hard.
Let's listen in So, to start off, we got to
talk about DARPA itself. Remember that's the research and development
arm of the Department of Defenses technically the US Defense
(01:11):
Advanced Research Projects Agency UH and DARPA has been responsible
for a lot of cutting edge research, largely in the
mode of military use. But we have seen the benefits
of that research hit us in other ways. Besides, you know,
the military applications, So for example, our pa net, the
(01:35):
predecessor to the Internet, was the platform upon which the
technologies that allow the Internet to work were developed. And
that was a DARPA project that was back when they
were first just called ARPA rather than DARPA. But we
wouldn't have the Internet, at least not the way we
have it today if it were not for this agency.
(01:57):
So the agency has done a lot of stuff that
has benefited us in many ways. I'll talk about another
one a little bit later on in the podcast, kind
of draw parallels to what happened with the robotics challenge.
So here we have this agency. They're all about research
and development. They don't actually have lots of labs with
(02:17):
scientists working in them. Know what this agency does is
it sends out proposals to other groups and asks them
to help work on various projects. Sometimes they hold challenges.
In these challenges, it's kind of an open invitation for
any group that can participate to uh to compete in
(02:40):
some way, and the winner usually gets some sort of
cash prize. And so often the cash prize will be
less than the investment needed to actually participate in the
competition to build out the thing that you need to
make for us to to win, but it's still a
very important UH and prestigious event to be part of
(03:03):
if you are capable of competing. Now we're talking mostly
about research departments engineering departments in universities, but there are
also some private institutions, not just university type things, but
actual research and development labs that will participate in DARPA
projects as well. And it's collectively that these teams were
(03:26):
kind of they're the ones that are pushing the technology forward,
and DARK is kind of the facilitator. They're offering up
the possibility for people to actually UH participate, and not
only the possibility, but the goals. They define the goals
that have to be met, and as it turns out,
defining those goals is a very important part of these
(03:48):
challenges because you have to tell the engineers what it
is they need to be able to do before they
can build the stuff that does it. If if you
have a very vague description of what needs to be done,
the possibilities of achieving it are so varied that it
(04:08):
can often paralyze a project nothing gets done. But if
you make it very specific, then it narrows down the
options and it gives more focus to the project. So
the DARPA Robotics project itself was inspired by a real
world disaster, specifically the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Now, this
(04:32):
was the nuclear facility, the nuclear reactor that was flooded
and then suffered some massive problems because of damage to
the infrastructure. And we're talking about a nuclear facility, Radiation
is a factor, so it's a very dangerous environment to
(04:55):
send responders to. Dark As approach was to create a
scenario in which a robot would need to go through
an environment similar to that that was at Fukushima and
be able to perform the tasks necessary to help avert
true devastation and catastrophe without putting people at risk. So
(05:20):
the idea is that you can use a robot which
is not going to respond to radiation the way a
living organism would and be able to actually carry out
the stuff you need to prevent a really huge problem
from getting worse. So uh, some people have referred to
(05:41):
the Darker Robotics Challenge as the Robolympics because it was
a series of tasks that a robot has to complete
and it had to all be the same. Robot teams
could not build individual robots designed to complete specific tasks.
If they could, it would be way easier of a
challenge because most of the robots that are in use
(06:03):
today have very narrow parameters. There's just maybe a single task,
or perhaps just a couple of small, you know, a
small range of tasks that the robot has to do.
It doesn't have to do anything outside of that. So
when you're designing the robot, you just say, all right,
what design elements will allow the robot to do what
(06:24):
it has to do. Anything that's outside of that is unnecessary,
we will not do it. Take the roomba as an example.
It's a great example. It's a robot the vacuums that
cleans floors. Anything that's not necessary for the roombot to
do that is put aside. You'd want to make sure
that all the design elements in your robot complement its purpose.
(06:47):
But if you have to complete a lot of different tasks,
and those tasks are not always similar to one another,
you complicate the whole design process by incredible factors. It's
hard to even express how much more difficult this is. Now,
(07:08):
if you've watched any of the videos that came out
of the Darker Robotics Challenge. You probably saw at least
one or two that were montages of robots falling over
and it's a little funny to watch. You see these
big robots just topple over sometimes apparently for no reason.
They just they just they're standing and then they collapse.
(07:31):
And there's something comic about that, you know that you
can't deny that it's funny, but it also demonstrates that
these robots are trying to do something that while we
as human beings might find easy, it's a real challenge
from a robotics standpoint. So this Darker Robotics Challenge had
three phases. The first one was a virtual challenge, which
(07:56):
in which teams were to design software that would allow
a virtual robot to complete um certain tasks within a
virtual environment. So there were no real robotics here, but
it was a test to see if if the teams
could actually build the software necessary to make the robot
do the tasks that needed to be done. The next
(08:20):
had a trial where it was a physical trial where
teams actually had to uh place a real robot through
to you know, go to the next level. And then
you had the finals, which were the ones that have
happened most recently. Uh, and I'll go through each of
the tasks that they had to do in just a second.
(08:40):
If we look back at the Virtual challenge, there were
twenty six teams that were part of it to build
that software. The robot they were controlling was a virtual
Atlas robot, which is a humanoid robot and was a
popular choice for a lot of the teams. When they
moved on to the more physical trials, they still would
(09:02):
use the Atlas robots. The the challenge, by the way,
did not require the teams to build their own robots
from scratch. They could use pre existing robots, but they
had to program them so that they could complete the
necessary tasks. So not every robot out there would have
been a good fit for this. Let's go back to
the Roomba. The roombo would have been a terrible choice
to enter into the Darbo Robotics Challenge. We'll be back
(09:26):
with more of this classic episode of tech Stuff after
this quick break. So, uh, here are some of the
virtual tasks that the virtual robots had to complete using
this software. They had to walk through an area of
(09:48):
uneven ground that had debris included there, so simulated debris
had to have a software that would allow the robot
to maintain its balance even while tracking a path to
a specific destination. Through this this uneven terrain, they had
to attach a hose to a spigot and turn a valve. Uh.
(10:09):
They also were given some artificial limits because and an
emergency situation, you cannot always count on your communication lines
being perfectly sound, such as that the Fukushima disaster. You
need to be sure that your robot can contend with
the fact that there might be lag between when you
(10:31):
can issue a command and when the robot is ready
for the next command. UH. That meant that some of
the teams started to really look at ways to create
a semi autonomous robot. So some of the teams built
robots that were capable of taking on some tasks autonomously. UH.
(10:51):
Some teams avoided that entirely. They focused on using the
robots as a direct extension of the control roles that
the humans were behind. So, in other words, you might
think of those robots as enormous technological puppets. The puppets
would respond to direct human commands and wouldn't be able
(11:14):
to do anything on their own. They didn't have any autonomy.
There are other ones that you know, you could have
semi autonomy in the show it a set of stairs
and you send it the command to climb those stairs,
and it could do the rest. It could calculate how
high it needed to put its feet and how to
shift its weight, that sort of stuff. UH, And there
were a lot of different strategies employed and to varying
(11:36):
degrees of success. It wasn't like the autonomous robots automatically
were better than the human controlled or vice versa. There
was actually it all depended on the implementation. So that
virtual trial ended up having one team winning pretty pretty decisively. UM.
(11:58):
It was the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, which
is UH, an organization in Pensacola, Florida, and eight other
teams qualified for the trials that we're going to be
held in December. Now, by the time those trials happened,
some of the teams had merged UH and some other
(12:22):
teams were coming into it. Six of the teams would
go on to compete at the trials that were held
at the Homestead Miami Speedway, and they had eight tasks
they had to complete that were similar to the ones
in the Darker robotics final, and those tasks included manning
a vehicle, um walking through uneven terrain, or otherwise moving
(12:45):
through uneven terrain. Robots did not have to be bipedal.
They could move around on however many limbs they had.
They just had to be also able to do these
other tasks. Uh. They had to be able to climb
a ladder. They had to be able to remove debris
from a door and then opened the door. They had
to be able to break through a wall. Uh, they
had to be able to handle valves and to attach
(13:07):
a hose to a spigott. The winning team of that
set of trials was a group called Shaft spelled s
C H A f T. This was a group out
of Japan. Now, when this group was competing, they were
this little independent group. But then they got acquired by
(13:28):
a little company that we've talked about several times on
this podcast. You know him. You may or may not
love them Google. So just before the trials, Google had
acquired uh, this this this group, this organization. Now Shaft
did really well, uh, which you know makes sense. I mean,
you've you've heard the theme song. But out of thirty
(13:50):
two points that it could possibly score. It earned twenty seven,
so pretty good score for for a robot and also
was seven points more than the next closest competitor, which
was from I H M C, the same group that
won the virtual trial earlier. Third place was Tartan Rescue
(14:13):
from Carnegie Mellon And that will be important in a
second to when we get into the finals. Now, Shaft
did not go on to compete in the DARPA Robotics
Finals because Google announced that they were refocusing the team,
dedicating it to actual commercial Google projects. So uh, they
(14:35):
were no longer being dedicated to this challenge. They were
being dedicated to a real world product of some sort.
Google's also had other involvement with some DARPA stuff, at
least after the fact. Google does not tend to get
involved in these challenges directly. Um, probably because of the
(14:57):
military association of DARPA and Google is very careful to
avoid those kind of associations. Now, the finals took place
over June five and June six and Pomona, California, and uh,
it was at the Fair Plex and there was quite
a crowd watching these events, and the reports I read
(15:20):
were really interesting, and also the videos I watched were
interesting because the crowd was extremely enthusiastic cheering on the robots,
groaning every time a robot failed a task or fell over,
gasping when that sort of stuff happened, because everyone wanted
to see these robots succeed. No one wanted any group
(15:40):
to fail. And uh. Also, the other interesting thing was
that it was really hard to tell if you were
in the audience when a robot was operating autonomously as
opposed to being controlled by humans. Um. That says two things,
One that the line between these two is getting further
and further blurred. And to that sometimes the robot would
(16:05):
behave in a weird way, and you couldn't be sure
if it was because the autonomous programming was lacking or
because the control mechanisms were limited. So, in other words,
it's not that necessarily that the art has gotten so
advanced that we can't tell the difference. It may be
that the art has not advanced enough that we can't
(16:26):
spot what is the cause of incompetence. And and I
use the word incompetence mainly as a joke. It's just
a joke because truthfully, it displays how difficult robotics as
a discipline actually is how how challenging it is to
design a robot that is capable of doing the same
(16:46):
sort of things that humans can do. It shows that
the things that we take for granted as being pretty
simple are fiendishly difficult when you get to a design
and programming level when you're actually building a robot that's
going to be capable of doing the same thing. So
here are the eight tasks that the robots had to complete,
(17:09):
and one of these tasks was called Surprise. I'll get
to it. But the reason it's called surprises that DARPA
told all the teams, your robot will encounter a task
similar to these other ones that you already know about,
but we're not going to tell you what it is.
And it meant that the teams knew that there was
(17:30):
going to be something on that list of tasks that
was not not defined, and that the robot would have
to be able to contend with it in order to
get a point for that particular task. And so the
tasks were um there were eight, Like I said, eight
of them. You were awarded a point if your robot
could successfully complete that task. So the score the final
(17:55):
scores once everything was done were determined by how many
tasks were completed successfully and what was the time of
the robots performance. Now, when they were first designing the robots,
teams were told they would have half an hour per task.
So you have eight tasks, half an hour per test,
that's four hours total. But the actual competition they were
(18:18):
told they would have one hour to complete all eight tests. Um.
And why you might think that, how is that fair?
As a as a bait and switch, you also have
to understand this was all about simulating an emergency response.
So under those emergency conditions, you can't expect to ask
for more time. That's not realistic. Uh. And it added
(18:41):
an extra layer of pressure on the teams. So those
eight tasks, the first one was to drive, so the
robots had to drive a Polaris Ranger XP nine vehicle.
These if you haven't seen them, they look like sometimes
you might call mcgator or you might think of it
as a golf car on steroids. These are um vehicles
(19:03):
that are similar to golf carts. They're they're largely open,
They've got heavier wheels than golf carts, do more warm
horsepower than a golf cart would, but it's definitely in
that range between golf cart and real car. Teams had
five minutes to alter the vehicle without using tools to
(19:24):
make sure that their robots could actually operate it. So
what the robots had to do was drive from the
starting point to a destination, and it was only considered
a success if the vehicle had completely moved past a
finishing mark. The vehicle also had to go through essentially
a driving course with obstacles and cones set up, and
(19:47):
it was determined that if the robot were to collide
with one of those obstacles or one of those cones
and cause it to move as a result of that collision,
the robot would not receive a point for that ask
the robot. Also, the team could choose for the robot too,
instead of driving, to walk to the destination, but in
(20:08):
that case they would not be awarded a point for
that task. They would forfeit the point um. But ideally
the robot would be able to operate the accelerator and
the steering wheel and maybe even the break and the shift.
The cars were already or the vehicles were already started,
The engines were already running, and they were already in
(20:31):
high gear. Because it was considered to be the smoothest
way for the robots to to maneuver the vehicle. But
if teams wanted to, they could design a robot that
would be capable of shifting gears. It was not a requirement,
it was just something they could do if they wanted to.
At any rate, the robot needed to be able to
(20:51):
drive safely from the starting point to the destination and
then halt the vehicle either by letting off of the
accelerators so it coasted to a stop, are actually applying
the brake. The next task. That was just task number one.
The next task was called egress, which is really just
getting out of the car. It sounds incredibly simple, and
(21:12):
for humans, for most of us, it really is pretty simple.
You know. We we intuitively know how to maintain our
balance and to shift our weight so that we go
from a seated position to standing. But that's not the
case with the robots. You have to design the robot
to do that. You have to program the robot to
do that. You know, the robot be able to anticipate
(21:34):
what a shift in its weight will do, what how
it's momentum will carry it forward. As it turns out,
This was one of the trickier tasks that teams had
to complete to get out of a vehicle. It was
not an easy thing to do um but they were
told that they could get out of the vehicle in
either direction. They didn't have to exit outll the left
(21:56):
side versus the right side. That the robot could get
out of either side, and again the task was considered
complete if the robot could get out of the vehicle
and maintain its balance and move on to the next challenge,
and if they could, it would receive a point. The
next one was door. Now egress was tough. Door was
(22:17):
surprisingly tough. You would think that opening a door would
be a pretty simple task. This was a push door
operated by a lever style handle. You had to push
up or pull you know, pull up or push down
rather on the handle and then push the door to
open it, then step through the door. The door did
not have a threshold, so there was nothing that you
(22:38):
had to step over. However, the door was a standard
thirty six inch wide doorway and with the door jam
that's closer to thirty three and a half inches, and
some of these robots were too wide to walk through
the door, you know, heading with their torso facing forward.
They actually had to turn sideways and then shuffle through
the doorway. And there were a lot of robots that
(23:01):
fell down at this stage of the the challenge. They
would lose their balance either when pushing the door or
when trying to maneuver through the doorway. One robot fell
down at this stage and was able to pick itself
back up very very slowly and deliberately, which is remarkable
(23:24):
because it's the only robot that managed to pick itself
back up after falling over, and that was the Carnegie
Melon robot, the same one we mentioned in the Trials
part in just a few moments ago. But anyway, that
was it. You just had to open the door and
walk through the doorway, and that was the end of
that task, and yet it was deceptively difficult. The next
(23:46):
one was Valve, which was not about the game company,
but rather about turning a control as if you were
turning a valve to operate a fire hose or to
shut down water to a specific part of the system,
which makes sense. In a nuclear facility, you might have
to shut off or open a valve. In that case,
(24:09):
the valve had to be turned counterclockwise in three sixty
degrees in order for the task to be complete, and
the team was only told that the valve would have
a size between four and sixteen inches in diameter, which
meant that you had to create a robot that would
be capable of gripping anything within that range and then
turning it in that counterclockwise direction three sixty degrees. Again
(24:34):
triggier than it sounds. We've got more to say in
this classic episode of tech Stuff. After these quick messages
the next step. The next task was called wall, in
which a robot had to pick up a cordless drill.
There were two of them available. They were not automatically on.
(24:57):
The robot had to operate the cordless drill and and
it on by squeezing the trigger, and use the cordless
drill to cut through some drywall in a shape that
was drawn on the drywall. The drywall was a half
inch thick, and the robot had to hold the drill,
operate the drill and move in this shape and then
(25:18):
remove the rubble. The idea being that sometimes the robot
might have to cut through a surface in order to
get access to certain controls uh that might otherwise be
blocked by collapse of a room or something along those lines.
Also pretty tricky, you know, using tools that were designed
to be held in human hands. You know, humans, we
(25:40):
we have the ability to detect how much pressure we're
using and to um to change that based upon what's happening.
Robots a little more tricky. I mean, you can have
sensors that alert the operator what's happening to what's happening,
but it's not intuitive. Again, you have to program it.
After wall was the surprise. Now, the surprise was something
(26:04):
that DARPA could change out from day to day. There
were two days of this series of challenges, and I
know that on one day, I'm not sure if this
was the same for the other day, but on one
day it involved picking up a plug and plugging it
into a socket. Uh. I think they probably changed it
for the second day, But I never could find out
(26:26):
what the surprise was on that case. But at any rate,
it also ended up being pretty tricky that I saw
one robot that attempted several times to plug the plug
into a socket and it was sad and funny at
the same time. But yeah, again, it was one of
those things where it was similar to tasks the robots
had had to do previously, but wasn't something they were
(26:49):
expressly told they would have to do during the actual challenge,
so that's what made it really hard. The next task
was rubble, in which the robot had to walk through
a debris field or on top of the debris, either
through it or on top of it. Again, very challenging
for robots to maintain their balance. There were lots of
(27:10):
you know, Boston Dynamics robots that were pretty good at
doing this, but still pretty tricky. You saw a lot
of robots fall over at this point too. And then
there were stairs that was the final task was to
climb us up stairs that had a rail on the
left side but no rail on the right side, And
once the robot was completely on the top of the stairs,
(27:32):
it was considered to have completed the task and the
course and it's time would be logged. So again, those
those tasks, for the most part, pretty simple for your
average human to do. But imagine that it's your job
to build a robot that could do all of those things.
It has to be able to have some form of perception,
(27:53):
has to be able to see either for the human
operators to pick up various two tools, or navigate through
certain areas, or for it to to see and operate
autonomously and has to be able to perceive its environment
understand depth. In fact, a lot of teams had trouble
with the the wall task because it was very hard
(28:16):
to perceive how far away the drill was from a
hand to pick it up and then use it again.
Things that are pretty easy for most of us very
hard from a robotic standpoint. Um. And like I said,
the door was one of the hardest ones. Uh. A
lot of robots had a lot of issues just walking
(28:37):
through a doorway, which is both funny and and really
does bring to light that we've got a long way
to go with robotics. Um. Well, if if you, as
someone in the crowd had said, if the robotic uprising happens,
just close the door and you'll be fine. Uh, Because
it's tricky stuff. It really shows the automation is. We
(28:59):
take a lot of it for granted because the examples
we see tend to be pretty elegant because they're designed
for a specific purpose. But as we start looking at
a more general purpose robot, we begin to understand exactly
how complicated we human beings are, so to design a
machine that can operate within our human world seamlessly is
(29:21):
an incredible challenge. So who won, Well, the first place
went to a South Korean team k A I ST.
It had its robot d d r C Hubo, which
completed all eight tasks in forty four minutes and twenty
eight seconds. Those eight tests forty four minutes and twenty
(29:43):
eight seconds, remember that's driving from one point to another
a very short distance, actually getting out of that vehicle,
walking through a doorway, cutting a hole through a wall,
turning a valve, plugging in a plug, um, walking over
some debris, and climbing some stairs. Something that would take
you know, a healthy person. If it took the more
(30:06):
than ten minutes, you would wonder what was going on.
So another example that the winning team did it in
forty four minutes and twenty eight seconds. There's also a
great preparation video for the d r C Hubo that
was put out by the South Korean team that I
loved because it was like a training montage from Rocky
(30:27):
and and they It was clear the team had a
sense of humor about this because it was showing the
robot not just complete tasks that would be similar to
the ones that were in the actual challenge, including things
like climbing a ladder or um or lifting a tool,
but also doing your typical, you know, training montage stuff
like doing push ups or taking a fighting stance like
(30:50):
you're a kung fu master, And that really tickled me.
I thought it was pretty entertaining but also very impressive
about what they were capable of doing with that robot.
The second place team was I H M C. That
Pencacle of Florida group we talked about a minute ago.
They were using the Boston Dynamics running Man Atlas butt Um.
(31:11):
It took it took about fifty minutes in twenty six
seconds to complete all eight tasks. After he did so,
after it had climbed the stairs, it lifted its arms
in victory and then fell over, So I guess that's Hubris.
The third place team was Carnegie Melon. Their team Tartan Rescue,
(31:31):
the one that had come in third place in the
trials as well. Their robot was called Chimp, which had
very long arms. Is a red robot with arms that
looked kind of freakishly long if you compare it to
a human, and it also had treads like a like
a treadmill type thing on both of its legs and
on both of its arms. And that was the robot
(31:54):
that fell over in the door challenge and was able
to right itself by itself, the only one that could
get up by itself and didn't need a team of
humans to actually lift it up. Now, those were the
only three teams that actually completed all of the eight tasks,
and they won the prizes. First place was two million dollars,
second place was one million, and third place was five thousand.
(32:15):
The other teams broke down like this. Four of them
were able to complete seven of the tasks, only one
was capable of completing just six tasks. You had two
teams that completed five, two teams that completed four, four
teams that completed three, two that completed to one that
(32:36):
completed one, and four teams weren't able to complete any
of the tasks successfully. Um. Now, the whole point of
this was to really push that state of the art forward,
to have engineers think, what would you need to do
to build a robot capable of actually responding to real
world situations? Who are the challenges that are in the
(32:59):
way of how can we advance the technology both in
the hardware and in the software to overcome these challenges.
And the goal was not to build a super robot
that's going to save the world. This is not you know,
the Avengers age of Ultron. That's not what's going on here.
It's all about incremental improvements in the art and discipline
(33:21):
of robotics so that the next generation of robots can
benefit from the research and development done in this first
generation and a good way of seeing how this plays
out in the real world, because you know, you might think, well,
that was a clever demonstration, but what what can we
expect here on our day to day lives. Take a
(33:43):
look at how autonomous cars are coming along, because of course,
DARPA held the Grand Challenge back in the mid to
late two thousand's, and that was the challenge in which
different groups tried to build self driving cars that could
complete a core whether it was on the desert or
simulated urban environment. And we are now seeing people who
(34:07):
worked on the various teams that that competed in that
DARPA Grand Challenge building what will be the first generation
of driver lest cars that will eventually make it to
the consumer market. Google has people on its team that
competed in those Grand challenges, So we're seeing that expertise
(34:30):
that was developed as as engineers were given a problem
and told find a way to solve this. We're seeing
that expertise they developed come into play in the real
world now. And it's sure it's gonna be a few
more years before we get autonomous cars as a reality
that an actual human being can go out and purchase,
(34:50):
as opposed to a representative of a company or you know,
just uh, you know, someone who is there to demonstrate
the viability of the technology. It's going to be a
few more years before this becomes something that you or
I could go to the dealership and actually purchase. But
the reality is there on the horizon. Same here with
the Darba Robotics challenge. It will likely take a decade
(35:15):
or more to develop a humanoid robot or a robot
capable of operating within a world designed by humanoids for
humanoids and do so seamlessly. It will take a lot
of time and a lot more development, but the foundation
has been laid, so I'm particularly excited to see what
(35:38):
the future holds for us based upon these results. And
while those montages of robots falling over are really funny.
I am actually optimistic about what robotics will be able
to accomplish in the future. I'm just also realistic that
it's going to take time. It's not We're not on
the verge of a terminator like future. The state of
(36:02):
the art and artificial intelligence has gotten gone very far
in certain realms of computer science, but when it comes
to robotics, there's all there are a lot of problems
that are still very difficult. You know that vision is
a big one. H and again, just being able to
maintain balance again one of those things that we take
(36:22):
for granted, really a challenging problem. I hope you enjoyed
that classic episode about the DARPA Robotics Challenge review. If
you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me
know what you're thinking, because otherwise I'll never know. The
best way to reach me is to use Twitter. The
(36:43):
show's handle is text Stuff HSW and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you
(37:03):
listen to your favorite shows. H
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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