Google Acquisition Leads DARPA Robotics Challenge

One of Google's recent robotics acquisitions, the Japanese-based company SCHAFT, has pulled into the lead of the Pentagon's DARPA Robotics Challenge.

During the trials last week, the SCHAFT robot completed most of the eight required tasks successfully. The team lost points when the wind blew a door out of the robot's reach, and because the robot could not climb out of a vehicle after navigating an obstacle course.

The trials were conducted at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. Sixteen teams competed. The eight selected to move forward can receive $1 million in support funds leading up the final event.

Second place in the trials went to IHMC Robotics from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, while third place went to Tartan Rescue, developed by the National Research Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon. MIT placed fourth, and NASA's RoboSimian came in fifth.

Read Desktop Engineering's previous coverage of the Robotics Challenge here.

Source: The New York Times