Today was the very first of two days of trials at the DARPA Robotics challenge at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida. produced after the Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, The robotics difficulty is developed to advance the specify of the art of robotics. The trials variety from driving a vehicle to clearing a debris field, to cutting with a wall. Robots score points based on their performance in the trials. much of the day was spent waiting on teams to prepare their robots. There were some interesting moments however, with one challenger falling with a stacked cinder block wall.
Pictured above is Valkyrie from NASA JPL JSC. We reported on Valkyrie earlier this month. probably one of the much better looking robots of the bunch, Valkyrie shown to be all show as well as no go today, failing to score any type of points in its day 1 trials. The day one lead went to Team Schaft, a new robot from Tokyo based startup business Schaft inc. Schaft scored 18 points in its very first day. In second location is the MIT team with 12 points. third location is currently held by team TRACLabs with 9 points. All this can modification tomorrow as the second day of trials take place. The online stream will be offered from 8am to 7pm EST on DARPA’s robotics difficulty page.