Robots may one day run emergency response teams.
A humanoid robot built by Schaft, a Japanese company owned by Google, scored top points for its ability to drive, walk, and climb latters at this year's DARPA Robotics Challenge in Miami during the Dec. 20 weekend.
The Schaft team, comprised of robotics students from the University of Tokyo, began developing the winning robot at their laboratory earlier this year. Gill Pratt, DARPA program manager who oversaw the Robotics Challenge, told the New York Times he was only expecting to see the robot in its planning stage when he visit the team over the summer.
"When we got there to do the site review and walked into their lab, we were amazed," Pratt said.
The challenge, funded by the Pentagon and organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a series of tests for robots designed to respond and help when disasters strike. The perform eight tasks, including walking across rough ground, driving an automobile, climbing latters and clearing waste from doorways, among other tests, ZD Net reported.
The robots were particularly created to help with cleanup after the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Japan had no robots available to help in the relief response, CNET reported.
Schaft's robot, about 58 inches tall with two legs, excelled during all of the tests, only loosing points because the wind blew a door from the robot's grip, and it could not exit a vehicle after driving it.
Of the 16 teams in the competition, eight of them, including Schaft, were selected to move on to another challenge in 2014 where the grand prize is $2 million. The eight teams can now claim $1 million to help prepare for next year, the Times reported.
Despite Schaft's advances, however, robots in general are not ready to replace humans doing the tasks performed in the challenge, Z Net reported.
"We know the robots are slow and unsteady at this point - they're much like a one-year-old human in terms of locomotion and grasping abilities and much farther behind that in brainpower," Pratt said in a statement for the challenge.
