DARPA contest seeking humanoid rescue robot.

• Position: Homeland Security News

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's latest robotic challenge calls for a human-shaped robot to carry out a series of search-and-rescue tasks.

The Defense Department agency in the first round of competition in December 2013 had teams from all over the world put bi-pedal robots through an obstacle course influenced by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.

A robot going into a radioactive disaster zone has to remove and manipulate objects that are designed for humans, literature describing the program stated.

Yet, Gil Pratt, DARPA robotics challenge program manager, said search-and-rescue robots that can function in toxic environments in the place of first responders are not necessarily the competition's ultimate goal.

"To be clear, we do not expect to exit the [challenge] with fully capable disaster response robots, but we will have made sufficient leaps forward in many vital technology areas such that others in the U.S. government, commercial industry, and elsewhere have the confidence they need to make the additional investments required to refine the technology and turn it into a finished product," he said in an email.

One of DARPA's first contests open to the public was the Grand Challenge in the mid-2000s, which had autonomous vehicles driving on a closed city course. That contest sparked interest in self-driving cars. Pratt said the state of humanoid robot development is similar to where autonomous vehicles were a decade ago. There were many institutions working on bits and pieces of the technology but not in any coordinated way.

"DARPA determined that the ... piecemeal model of robotics research and development would not deliver the technologies required for disaster-response robots anytime in the near-term--certainly not in time to mitigate the effects of the next natural or man-made disaster--so we set about to tackle several of the technical challenges at once."

Teams competing can either supply their own robots capable of carrying out the series of tasks, or use a humanoid machine provided by DARPA and built by Boston Dynamics. That's because some teams are better at software...