Google’s Schaft robot wins DARPA rescue challenge

As Electronic Products recently reported, Google has been procuring many tech companies to expand its working knowledge of the robotics field. The recent acquirement of Tokyo’s Jouhou System Kougaku lab has proven to be beneficial for Google’s endeavors. The Schaft robot that has been developed by the aforementioned Japanese lab, has won the DARPA rescue challenge, successfully completing all eight rescue tasks.

Pentagon’s research unit, DARPA, decided to hold this competition after realizing that robots’ tasks were limited, as demonstrated in 2011’s Fukushima nuclear reactor snafu in Japan. Gill Pratt, the program manager for the DARPA Robotics Challenge stated, “What we realized was… these robots couldn’t do anything other than observe. What we needed was a robot to go into that reactor building and shut off valves.”

Out of the 100 teams that applied to compete, 17 robots made the cut before the event. The Chinese team, Intelligent Pioneer, dropped out of the competition at the last minute, leaving 16 teams to compete. Some entered their homemade robots, while others used their own software with Atlas, the robot made by the Google-owned business, Boston Dynamics.

DARPA gave the robots three points for completing the course’s objective, then awarded bonus points for performing the tasks without the intervention of humans. Schaft competed against the 15 other teams, and scored a total of 27 out of the 32 possible points throughout the tasks that were completed within the 30 minute time-limit.  The tasks included climbing an 8ft-high ladder, removing debris that blocked a doorway, pulling open a lever-handled door, and driving a utility vehicle along a course. The robots also had to cross a course with ramps, steps, and blocks, cut a triangular shape in a wall using a cordless drill, close three air valves, and unreel a hose then screw its nozzle into a wall connector.

The Schaft robot measures in at 1.48m and uses high-voltage liquid-cooled motor technology. For power, a capacitor is used instead of a battery, to give it “muscles.” This technology enables full-force motion, allowing the robot to turn at higher speeds than otherwise possible with other forms of power. It performed the tasks with ease, and only lost points because “the wind blew a door out of the robot’s hold and because their robotic creation was not able to climb out of a vehicle after it successfully navigated an obstacle course,” as announced by Japan Daily Press.

As brilliantly as Schaft performed in the competition, this robot is still much slower than humans due to the lag between actions from the calculations that need to be carried out for each motion. Some of the other robots in the competition were proven unstable, and only kept balance from the attached harnesses. Other robots, like Valkyrie designed by NASA’s Johnson Space Center, failed in the challenge’s completion. 

Jyuji Hewitt from the US Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command depicted this event as a “reality check,” in reference to how robots can be both capable and incapable depending on the particular task. 
Now that Schaft has won the competition, it is now eligible to apply for DARPA-funded grants. In 2014, Schaft will participate in DARPA’s competition finals.

Story via BBC