14 DAY TRIAL // The DARPA Robotics Challenge is now over, and the competition has been won by a team from South Korea with a robot called DRC-HUBO. It's not hard to imagine that the robot is actually running a modified Linux distribution.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge was a competition organized by the famous US agency and that brought together robotics teams from all over the world. The end goal was to build a robot that can go into disaster zones and perform some tasks without any help from its human builders. The present level of technology won't allow us to do more than some clumsy bipedal replicas of humans, but things are evolving, especially with the help of such competitions.
DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it's usually associated with all kinds of weird and funny conspiracies, but the truth is that they just want to invest in the best technology out there. It's an agency that employs a lot of scientists and it's currently undergoing a ton of projects. The Robotics Challenge is just one of those projects.
DRC-HUBO runs Linux
To no one's surprise, the DRC-HUBO robot is actually running Linux and a dedicated software stack, but that is probably true for most of the robots that have participated in the challenge. The robot from the South Korean team managed to clear all the obstacles and to get a great score, claiming first place.
"The team uses the Xenomai real-time operating system for Linux and a customized motion control framework called PODO developed at KAIST. They also use the Gazebo simulation environment. The team designed their software with a focus on the low bandwidth and unstable nature of communications between operators and robot. DRC-HUBO, beat out 22 other robots from five different countries, winning the US $2 million grand prize. The robot’s 'transformer' ability to switch back and forth from a walking biped to a wheeled machine proved key to its victory," reads the entry on spectrum.ieee.org.
You can check the official website of the DARPA Robotics Challenge to see all the robots in action.