DARPA Robotics Challenge Shows Off Software: MIT and JPL Among Winners (Video)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is starting to shell out some awards. It's selected more than half a dozen teams to receive funding after they competed in a software challenge leading up to the agency's Robotics Challenge.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is a competition to actually create robots, developing both hardware and software. Its main call is for robots that can be used to help victims of natural or man-made disasters and to conduct evacuation operations. These ground-based machines should be able to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded or human-engineered environments.

This latest initiative, though, focused more on the software than the hardware. A total of 26 teams from eight countries qualified to compete in the virtual challenge, which was a simulated environment that looked like an obstacle course set in suburbia. Think of it as a high tech video game that allowed judges to examien how well the software worked. Each team applied software of their own design to a simulated robot in order to complete a series of tasks, such as driving a vehicle, walking over uneven ground and using tools. This allowed the judges to see exactly how well the software might be able to be transferred to actual robots.

"The simulator allowed teams to send commands are receive data over the Internet to and from a simulated Atlas robot--information very similar to what would be sent between a physical robot and its operator in the real world," said DARPA in an interview with PCMag.com.

So what sort of challenges did these virtual robots have to overcome? The teams needed their software to have the robot get into a utility vehicle and drive it on a course on a road, travel over uneven terrain and pick up a fire hose, connect it to a spigot and turn on a valve.

Already, nine teams have been announced as winners for this particular challenge. The top team was from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition from Florida, which racked up a staggering 52 points with their software. They were followed by a team from Worcester Polytechnic Institute at 39 points and then MIT with 34 points. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was also among one of the top contenders. The competition will move forward with further trials in December before the contest eventually concludes with a final challenge in 2014.

Want to learn a little bit more about the robotics challenge? You can check it out in the video below, courtesy of YouTube.