DARPA set robot disaster response trials

Armed Forces Press Service:

Next week, 17 teams will take their multi-limbed, capable-looking robots through eight realistic disaster-response tasks that will make up the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotics Challenge Trials Dc. 21-22 at Florida’s Homestead-Miami Speedway.

The best performers will determine the baseline for the state of robotics, Dr. Gill Pratt, DARPA’s Robotics Challenge program manager, said during a recent teleconference. And DARPA will fund up to eight of the highest-scoring teams for another year as they move on to the DRC Finals in 2014, after which one team will receive a $2 million prize.

“The purpose of the program is to develop technology that can help make us much more robust to natural and manmade disasters,” Pratt explained.

“In particular,” he added, “we’re looking at robotic technology that can allow us to mitigate the extent of a disaster during the first hours and days while the disaster is still unfolding.”

DARPA was directly inspired to create the program by the 2011 accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, Pratt said, which was caused when an earthquake and tsunami knocked out backup power systems needed to cool the plant’s reactors, causing three of them to undergo fuel melting, hydrogen explosions and radioactive releases.

“During the first 24 hours there,” he said, “if only human beings had been able to go into the reactor buildings and vent built-up gas that was accumulating inside the reactors, the explosions that occurred might have been prevented and the disaster would not have been as severe.”

That’s just one example, Pratt added.

“We don’t know what the next disaster will be, so the technology we’re trying to develop [will] allow human beings and robots working together to have an effect on evolving disasters in environments that are too dangerous for human beings to go into by themselves,” he said.

DARPA is trying to improve robotic mobility and dexterity to achieve the following goals for disaster-response robots, Pratt said:

-- The robots have to work in environments that are engineered for people, including environments that are degraded by an evolving disaster;

-- The robots have to be able to use human tools, everything from screwdrivers to fire trucks that may be available in the disaster area; and

-- The robots must have an improved human-to-robot interface, to reduce the amount of training needed by personnel who are experts in handling disasters but not necessarily in handling robots.
...

This program has the potential to develop robot that will go well beyond disaster response efforts and actually help fighters on the battlefield.  We are in the very early stages of this technology, but it has great potential.