THE BRIGHT red robot lay sprawled across the threshold, seemingly unable to go on. Chimp, built by Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Centre (NREC), had successfully driven a car down a short simple slalom track. It had climbed out of the car, though not without some difficulty, headed over to a door and opened it. But after starting to move through the door Chimp came to a sudden halt; with a lot of inertia (it weighs 200kg) and its centre of gravity a little too far forward, that caused it to topple.
It was not the first to fall. The DARPA Robotic Challenge (DRC) was a three-year competition in which research teams from a number of countries tried to get robots to do things that might be required after a disaster like that at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011. Its finals, held in Pomona, California, on June 5th and 6th, saw robots fall every which way. They fell on their faces. They fell on their backs. They toppled like toddlers, they folded like cheap suits, they went down like tonnes of bricks. There were dents, breakages, spasms and even bleeding (or, at least, the catastrophic loss of hydraulic fluids). What there was not was any getting back up again. Except, that is, for Chimp (pictured below).
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1MsGwKT
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