The American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is hosting a worldwide competition aimed to develop disaster response robots.
“The DRC Finals will take place from June 5-6, 2015 at Fairplex in Pomona, California. The DRC Finals will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators; the winning team will receive a $2 million grand prize; DARPA plans to award $1 million to the runner-up and $500,000 to the third-place team.”
You can watch the final of the competition, when it begins, below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ_wVkPrKyg]
Before that starts, get yourself acquainted with the participants:
You may notice that the robots are mostly humanoid. The reason for this is because an entry requirement in the competition was that the robots had be designed for use in disaster relief – which means moving through environments occupied by humans. Another stipulation was an ease of use for regular people to operate the units, as you don’t always have a trained engineer hanging around to help out with rescue efforts.
HRP-2+ gets our vote because it looks like a Megazord from Power Rangers.
[Source – DARPADRC]
