The world may be oohing and awing over all the wonderful uses we’re finding for graphene, but there’s another super-material vying for the spotlight. Vanadium dioxide might eventually become a household name because in addition to revolutionizing electronics, researchers have now discovered it can be used as an artificial muscle 1,000 times stronger than our own.
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The teams have broken down their robots and packed them up in crates and suitcases, loaded them into trucks and taken them on airplanes and gone home. Some will lick their wounds and rebuild to fight another day. The lucky ones will get a million dollars each from DARPA to continue developing their bots.
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DARPA’s Robotic Challenge Trials wrapped up earlier today, and the robot that reigned supreme is SCHAFT. The squat 209 pound, 4.85 foot-tall robot smoked the competition, scoring 27 points, besting its next closest competitor by 35% in overall points.
The challenge is focused on demonstrating advancements in robotics which could improve disaster response efforts. For the competition, the bipedal humanoid robots had to perform each of the following tasks:
In the end, SCHAFT beat out numerous teams from DARPA’s home nation, taking the top spot in the terrain, ladder, debris, and fire hose tasks.
Here’s Team SCHAFT explaining a bit about what makes their robot special:
The time-compressed footage shown below is SCHAFT practicing its tasks prior to this weekend’s event.
Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition’s (IMHC Robotics) robot did quite well, coming in second place, taking first place in the door and wall challenges.
While it’s the end of the line for some of the robots, the top eight teams will get funded to move on to the final rounds in 2014.
[via LiveScience]
Gizmodo’s coverage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge continues with day two at the Homestead Speedway south of Miami. The weekend has arrived and the crowds are here with their kids, cheering on the bots.
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We’ve seen countless videos of ATLAS
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What will robots really be like when they finally achieve a human level of intelligence and autonomy? No one knows for sure, but we’ve put together a list of books that will challenge and disturb your preconceptions about what robots might become.
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The DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, kicked off today at the Homestead-Miami Speedway about 30 miles south of Miami. A total of sixteen teams from around the world are here to challenge each other today and tomorrow in timed trials, and to compete for funding from DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science arm. A seventeenth team, from China, hit travel snags and hasn’t made it here yet.
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I can never decide which side I’m on. Autobots or Decepticons. This amazing gingerbread Optimus Prime has swayed me. It was made by a friend of a friend of Redditor downvotedagain.
We don’t know much about this amazing holiday treat. Not even if this girl is the one who made it. None of that matters. All that matters is that this is a thing. A really awesome thing I would like to admire and then eat. The detail is really nice and he looks like he could hold his own in an all out gingerbread robot fight. Oh yeah. I break me off a piece of that robot and serve it up with a nice cold glass of milk. It would probably take a month to eat this thing.
No icing though. That might be a deal breaker. Gotta have icing on your gingerbread robots.
[via Reddit via Geekologie]
Today kicks off the two-day mechanolympics of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials at Homestead Miami Speedway. With teams from around the world competing in eight tasks, only one will take home the purse. Just a few hours in—watch live here—it’s still any robot’s game. We’ve got your odds right here, so you can bet on the future.
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Kirobo, a robot that has been sent to space in August this year, has carried out a mission that will sit well with curious onlookers and observers. Footage has been released that depicted the first humanoid robot ever in space actually carrying out a conversation with the commander of the International Space Centre, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. All right, perhaps conversation might be a wee bit too weighty in this case, but small talk would be better suited. (more…)
Kirobo Robot Carries Out First Space Chat Ever original content from Ubergizmo. 
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