
South Koreans triumph in US robot challenge - dnetesn
http://phys.org/news/2015-06-south-koreans-triumph-robot.html
======
fblp
Fast motion video of the winning robot:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0)

1min trailer of the winning robot:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4B5BhDoS9o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4B5BhDoS9o)

------
Animats
That was a big change in the standings since yesterday. IHMC and KAIST weren't
even in the top 3 as of 5 PM yesterday. I thought Tartan Rescue had won.

------
Animats
I get the feeling that nobody responding here watched the competition. Is
there a forum where anyone is discussing this subject?

Notes:

\- Everybody using the Atlas robot had stability problems. Nobody seemed to be
outside of static stability (base of support under CG) let alone outside of
ZMP stability (base of support under CG modified to account for momentum.) Any
loss of balance meant a fall. They're probably using the basic DLL that Boston
Dynamics provided to get teams going. (One team admitted this.) That has
functions "walk slowly", and "stand maintaining balance using only joints from
the hip and below", plus direct control of joints. Boston Dynamics has
demonstrated much better locomotion control than that, but the teams didn't
have access to it. (Boston Dynamics supplied the Atlas robots and thus could
not compete.) IHMC was working on balance recovery [4] but didn't have it
working in time.

\- This is the new Atlas robot, unveiled in January 2015. It's still mostly
hydraulic, but it's now self-powered, with a big battery backpack. I think
there's also a hydraulic accumulator in there, so they can recover some energy
when running, but nobody at the event went fast enough to gain from that.
Mechanically, that machine is far more capable than it appeared to be in the
competition. It's quite capable of picking up objects from the ground, and
getting up if it falls. Nobody did either in the competition. The teams only
got these new robots around February, so they really haven't had the time to
develop software to use them effectively. Right now, the hardware is much
better than the software.

\- Everybody was doing their manipulation by almost pure teleoperation. As
soon as DARPA introduced delays into the data links (which they do to penalize
teleoperation), the robots spent most of their time stopped. The operators
were stuck waiting for enough data to get through to update their screens. Not
much autonomous operation here. Here's the winning team video, sped up about
30x.[2] Note that although it's capable of walking, it was run in kneeling
wheel mode almost all the time. Only for the stair climbing did it walk.

\- Nobody had combined manipulation and locomotion working at all. That's why
getting out of the vehicle was so hard - it takes coordinated leg and arm
movements.

\- The CMU team had a partially tracked base, and the NASA/JPL team had a
"monkey" robot with rollers at knees and elbows. They both did reasonably
well. If you're going to teleoperate, a dumber, statically stable robot is
easier to deal with. Of the top 3 finishers, only one used an non-wheeled
robot, an Atlas. Here's their first run, with two falls.[3] Again, this is a
30x speedup. The penalty for a fall or a need for repair was only a 10 minute
penalty, not disqualification.

\- The tasks were dumbed down twice during the project. The original specs
called for the robots to have to replace a pump. The final competition only
required turning a valve and cutting a hole in very soft material with a power
drill. Basically, the tasks were reduced to the point that they were hard, but
not so hard as to lead to total fail.

\- Schaft did better in the first round back in 2013, but after Google bought
them, they were pulled from the competition. Google, remember, now owns
Schaft, Boston Dynamics, and several other robotics companies.

I look forward to the next competition. If work continues, in a year or two
the results should be far better.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27HkxMo6qK0)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_yfvlplJe0)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDXnlgNkRl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDXnlgNkRl4)
[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soPM7LddLY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soPM7LddLY8)

~~~
dljsjr
This is all more or less correct… just a few things to add (I'm on Team IHMC
Robotics) :)

1\. It's _highly_ unlikely that this version of Atlas can get up from a fall
under its own power, at least not expediently; it weighs much more than the
old one and it actually has a slightly weaker hydraulic system. The old pump
motor was a constant speed/constant displacement 3000 PSI system. The current
one is a variable speed/constant displacement system that tops off at around
~2600 PSI, and the robot is around 35-40 lbs heavier than the old one. Even if
the arms are strong enough, none of the COTS grippers that integrate with the
robot could handle getting up; the fingers would explode. I've seen lots of
videos of the old tethered Atlas getting up. I find it amusing to think that
the current one could pick itself up.

2\. We (IHMC) don't do ZMP based stability. All of our walking/balancing is
based on something called Instantaneous Capture Point, that the head of our
lab pioneered during his PhD and which several other researchers have gone on
to refine over the last 10 years or so. Lots of people use it for fall
recovery (MIT does in their recent Atlas video that's similar to ours) but we
also use it for walking as well. We call it ICP, but vision people get cranky
when we say that because ICP is also short-hand for Iterative Closest Point.

3\. amjaeger is correct, our robot was very badly damaged by our falls on
Friday. Enough that we were very worried about how it would impact our
performance. Our falls on Friday were both more or less the result of operator
error (with some hardware problems mixed in, but mostly operator error), and
our stability issues on Saturday were the result of the falls on Friday.

4\. The comment about manipulation being pure teleop is a little reductionist.
It is teleop in the sense that it's not autonomy, but almost nobody was doing
direct joint servoing which is what I usually think of when somebody says pure
teleop. For example, we actually operated continuously during comms blackouts.
When we cut out the wall on Saturday, almost the whole thing happened during a
blackout. But when your 400lb robot doesn't have a safety line, it behooves
you to be extra careful. We cut out the wall just as slowly during perfect
comms back in the lab because there's lots of ways to screw that task up.

------
ckozlowski
To the South Korean team: Congrats!

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MCRed
This is just the beginning, both for robots and for asian dominance. Culture
plays a huge role, and in our culture we're happy to watch Reality TV and let
government babysit our kids. Government doesn't care about robot competitions.
I assume in Korea but believe in general in asia, the parents are more on top
of their kids, so that even if they have a "lower quality" government (Which
is always debatable) in China, for instance, eventually we're going to be less
and less the source of these kinds of technical advances over time.

Hell, even if the chinese culture doesn't inspire creativity and achievement,
just by demographics they should produce three times as many innovations as
us, since if the innovative people are %0.1 of the population, they have three
times the population.

~~~
melling
"Government doesn't care about robot competitions."

That was a DARPA competition they won.

~~~
noobermin
Which confuses me. I wasn't aware DARPA opened it's competitions to non-USA
teams.

~~~
nether
Well, now you're aware.

~~~
noobermin
Unfortunately, it seems my comment was taken with an assumed connotation. I
simply wasn't aware that DARPA opened it to any one outside of the US since,
well, it's DARPA. It probably wasn't the most insightful comment in the world,
but, yes--now I am aware.

