This past month I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to go to the Darpa Robotics Challenge in Pasadena, California. I, like many geeks, love robots. I'm sure I'm not the only one who wanted a pet Big Dog, for example. I was really excited to have the opportunity to see the DRC finalists compete, up close and personal!
The DRC was started to stimulate the construction of rescue robots that could perform necessary tasks in environments that were unsafe for humans to enter due to man-made or natural disasters.
I'm honestly not sure what I expected. I'd been to a greyhound track before (which was prenaturally depressing). A part of me thought that I would see robots tearing around the track, juggling tasks with all the poise and acumen of professionals. Another part knew that I should probably modify my science-fiction expectations, and that it was unlikely that the robots would be able to complete their obstacle courses faster than a well-trained human.
What I did not expect was the slow, painful plodding that made up the majority of the DRC.
The robots, on average, took about an hour to complete a course I could have completed in ten minutes...one-handed...while drunk. The course consisted of several different challenges: 1. Drive a cart, 2. Exit a cart (preferably, without falling over), 3. Open a door, 4. Go through the door 5. Turn off a switch.
That said, the amount of effort and ingenuity that went into these robots is phenomenal. I had the opportunity to walk through the "garage", the building where the teams that had worked on the robots worked, ate, and slept. (Well, most of them didn't sleep, until the final day of the DRC). It's easy to forget that something we do almost unconsciously, something as simple as opening a door, requires an elaborate choreography of neurons and muscles. Seeing the furor in the garage, the nervous, excited energy of the teams, brought it home to me that this, truly, had taken a monumental effort.
After all, scientific progress rarely proceeds in leaps and bounds. Rather, it's more often a slow, often painful process, like the progress of a state-of-the-art robot through a door. We are working on laying the foundations, and that's a necessarily long and complicated process- we have to be sure that our engineering is solid and sound before we proceed to build a house. The robots on display at the DRC were taking their first wobbling, awkward baby steps towards the future, and I, for one, cannot wait to see where they end up taking us.
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