A team of South Korean researchers has topped all other entrants in a contest to build a robot that can respond to disaster situations that would present too much safety risk for humans.
In the culmination of the 3-year, $3.5 million contest held by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Team Kaist of Daejon won the first-place prize of $2 million at the agency's Robotics Challenge Finals in Pomona, California.
The Korean DRC-Hubo robot was judged best at accomplishing eight tasks seen as important in disaster response, including opening doors, navigating stairs, climbing over rubble, turning valves and operating circuit breakers to shut of electrical power.
The Korean team consisted of programmers and engineers from the research institute formerly known as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, now simply Kaist.
Their 176-pound, 6-foot-tall humanoid completed the course of disaster tasks in just over 44 minutes, 6 minutes faster than the robot from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, which won its developers the $1 million second prize.
Third place and its $500,000 went to Team Tartan Rescue from Carnegie Mellon University.
DRC-Hubo is equipped with two arms and is designed to either walk upright on two feet or kneel down and roll forward on wheels built into its knees.
"It's a great moment," Kaist team leader In So Kweon said of the challenge victory. "The most important thing is the humanoid robot's system is so well built. It has good balancing and can walk on its feet or roll on wheels. It was a brilliant mechanical idea."
The DARPA contest began after the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, which saw workers unable vent off hydrogen out of the damaged reactors without being exposed to excess radiation when the power planet was damaged by an earthquake and resultant tsunami.
The concept was to develop a robot that would perform such vital emergency efforts in similar disaster situations in the future.
Twenty-three internationals teams took part in the DARPA competition.
Organizers live streamed the final challenge competition on YouTube as the robots struggled—and sometimes fell—during their journey through the disaster course.
"These robots are big and made of lots of metal, and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety," said competition organizer Gill Pratt, the DARPA program manager. "But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell.
"And what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered! It's an extraordinary thing, and I think this is one of the biggest lessons from DRC—the potential for robots not only to perform technical tasks for us, but to help connect people to one another," he said.
