Yesterday, the Department of Defense's advanced research arm, DARPA, announced the details of its next grand challenge. Following up on its autonomous vehicle challenge, the research agency will now focus on robots that do need an operator. But these robots are meant to operate in what DARPA calls "degraded" environments—basically, disaster zones of various flavors—where bandwidth between the operator and the robot won't be guaranteed.

DARPA's Dr. Gill Pratt, who described the program earlier this week, said the goal of the grand challenge was to help the DOD fulfill one of its 10 mission roles—the ability to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief. But the agency's thinking was clearly influenced by the Fukushima disaster. "During the first 24 hours [of Fukushima], there were several opportunities for intervention to help make the disaster less severe," Pratt said, "but unfortunately, people could not go in to that zone because the radiation was too high, and as a result, the disaster was worse than it could have been."

The DARPA robots therefore must operate in what Gill termed an "engineered" environment, "not a random, unstructured outdoor environment." Such an environment is likely to include tools, so the robot will be expected to navigate doors and stairways and use everything from screwdrivers to vehicles. Again using Fukushima as a point of reference, Gill mentioned that fire trucks were used in high-radiation areas at the site, a task that could have been handled more safely and thoroughly if humans weren't involved.

Because Fukushima was a high-radiation environment, communicating with many robots would have been a challenge (radiation can interfere with command-and-control systems). So DARPA's grand challenge will focus explicitly on robots that can operate with a greater degree of autonomy in cases where their operators have limited ability to exchange information and commands with them.

Such robots are also easier to operate. "In general, most of the robots that are out there these days require significant training for the operators in order for them to have high confidence in using them," Pratt said. "Often, in a disaster, the experts who know how to handle the disaster are not robotics experts."

For the grand challenge, planned tasks (which are subject to change) include driving a vehicle under operator control, opening doors, climbing stairs, and connecting cables and hoses.

So far, a variety of universities and companies have signed on to build robots. These include Carnegie Mellon, Drexel University, and Virginia Tech on the academic side, and Raytheon and SCHAFT from the commercial space. Two groups from NASA that have experience with operating robots in space—the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Johnson Space Center—have also signed up.

Track B

The contest won't be limited to teams that can build their own robots. A second set of teams (called, creatively, Track B) will use a simulation package provided by DARPA and, if successful at building software, will be given a standard, government issue robot. There are Track B teams from many of the Track A participants, as well as MIT, the Universities of Kansas and Washington, and Ben Gurion University. Commercial participants in Track B include Lockheed Martin, RE2, TORC Robotics, and RAC Labs.

The simulation package is being generated by funding the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which will update its existing package (released under the Apache license) to handle cloud computing, with the goal of allowing it to simulate a complex environment in real time. "We want to have these tools outlast the program," Pratt said.

The six Track B teams that show the best progress will be given a robot built by Boston Dynamics, pictured above. It's an updated version of the robot shown in the video below.

In addition to the teams it's providing startup funding for, DARPA will let anyone use the simulator to try to build their own robot control software. If any of this code places high enough in the first virtual challenge (held in the simulator), the teams behind the code will also get funding to move forward (along with, ultimately, a robot).

Right now, the plan is to have the first virtual challenge next year, after which robots will be issued to six teams. The final grand challenge, which will pit these robots against any Track A teams that are still participating, will face off in the real world in December 2014. The winner of that challenge will get $2 million—and, quite possibly, the chance to sell some robots back to the government.