December 20th and 21st DARPA will host their Robotics Challenge Trials at Florida’s Homestead Speedway. Seventeen teams from around the world are set to compete and the trials will determine which of them will continue on to the finals in 2014. The selected teams will receive continued DARPA funding and the winning team will receive a two million dollar prize.
DARPA’s contest will consist of several challenges including driving a utility vehicle, walking over uneven terrain, clearing debris, breaking through a wall, closing a valve, and connecting a fire hose.
NASA has two robots going into competition, RoboSimian out of California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is modeled after a monkey and can work on two limbs or on all fours, as well as Valkyrie, dubbed the superhero robot, out of the NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
RoboSimian isn’t finished but you can see its development as well as some concept animations here.
Valkyrie however is completed and in the flesh, so to speak. Standing at 6.2 feet tall and 275 pounds it resembles a human being so convincingly that if the head (which reminds me of something out of an 80’s toy catalog) were replaced with a helmet, you might believe there was a person inside.
The glowing NASA symbol on the chest makes the robot look like a real life robo-iron-man, made of real iron… and presumably some other stuff like… science, magic, and the collective dreams of eleven year old boys the world over.
Valkyrie is slightly reminiscent of an earlier robot NASA created, the Robonaut which currently resides and works alongside astronauts on the International Space Station, the major difference being that unlike Robonaut, Valkyrie has legs and also appears to be a girl. Of course robots don’t have naughty bits so it isn’t gender specific but the name Valkyrie hails back to Norse mythology and female figures who decide who lives and dies in battle… is NASA eluding to something? Probably not. It’s just a cool sounding name, couple that with the fact that the robot clearly appears to have bosoms and it’s clear their creation is meant to evoke a female persona. Which is awesome if you ask me. I’m all for girls having more awesome role models of the human or robot variety, especially in fields of science and engineering. We need their brains and if we want their brains, we need their hearts.
Valkyrie has 44 degrees of freedom or for our action figure loving readers, points of articulation. It’s also equipped with an array of cameras mounted throughout the structure from head to toe. A battery pack mounted in the back can sustain Valkyrie for about an hour and powers its movement, many cameras, as well as sonar and LIDAR sensors.
For those of you unfamiliar with LIDAR, it is a sensing technology that measures distance by bouncing lasers off of its surroundings and analyzing the reflected light creating highly detailed maps.
Nicholaus Radford of the NASA JSC Dextrous Robotics Lab said “NASA saw a considerable overlap between what the DRC was trying to accomplish and NASA’s goals as an agency, we want to get to Mars. Likely, NASA will send robots ahead of the astronauts to the planet. These robots will start preparing the way for the human explorers, and when the humans arrive, the robots and the humans will work together.”
Presumably before the trip to Mars, the battery pack would be replaced with some alternate power source, solar panels or as in the case of the Mars Rovers, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator powered by plutonium.
You can see Valkyrie in action below, granted it’s still in the lab and everything is tentative but I can’t wait to see these things all around, saving people from rubble, stopping super villains, and planning their eventual takeover of the human race.