

Korea’s Team KAIST Wins the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge - snehesht
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/06/koreas-team-kaist-wins-the-2015-darpa-robotics-challenge/
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0
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hexagonc
As a robot enthusiast, I found it strangely captivating watching these slow,
mostly bumbling robots complete and try to complete the tasks. It seems like
it would be boring but I had the main commentary stream going pretty much all
day in the background while I worked on software for my own bipedal robot.
Whenever something important was happening, the audience would cheer or the
commentator would point it out so you didn't have to fully pay attention the
whole time.

The key thing to take from this is that there is a huge gulf between the best
robot competitors and the worst. The best robots seemed like, with more
hardening, they could be deployed in certain disaster areas even today. The
worst robots seemed to struggle just walking on two legs on anything but
perfectly smooth terrain. Laugh while you still can at the numerous fail
videos that will emerge but the KAIST team's robot will make you a believer.
That robot was very clever as were most of the other robots from the top
teams.

A slight correction to the linked article: the IHMC robot did _not_ just
promptly fall after climbing the stairs and celebrating; instead, its arm got
caught on the rails of a platform that the stairs led to. It had already
completed all tasks of the course.

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neurologic
The winning entry used slow and handcrafted controllers, which is why the
videos are sped up. A few months ago,
[http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/](http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/)
was announced. Notice that in the videos here the robot's movement is very
fast and humanlike (real time, as opposed to 15x of the KAIST video). This
technique will be used in all of the robotics challenges in a year or two,
which will look like a discontinuous improvement in robotics performance.

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snehesht
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0)

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Vorcin83
This [1] list of failures shows that some robots seem to "just" have hardcoded
motions, for example for turning the valve.

[1] [https://youtu.be/g0TaYhjpOfo?t=48](https://youtu.be/g0TaYhjpOfo?t=48)

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ilurk
Are there any FOSS frameworks for robots, and what is their current status?

I mean, is there anything that includes a module for bipedal movement?

Disclaimer: curious about robots; no experience

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pveierland
ROS is a popular framework with permissive licences [1]. It is used with many
different types of robots; among them also bipedal humanoids [2].

[1] [http://www.ros.org/is-ros-for-me/](http://www.ros.org/is-ros-for-me/) [2]
[http://wiki.ros.org/Robots](http://wiki.ros.org/Robots)

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snehesht
Here's another video of Cheetah jumping during a run
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65a0RFhdd8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C65a0RFhdd8)

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iamcreasy
I was cheering for NASA's Robosimian. They was it was transforming was truly
captivating.

