By the look of things here in the pit lane of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, humanoid robots will remain more science fiction than science fact for a while longer.

Dr. Pratt, who before coming to Darpa was a pioneer in developing technologies that made it possible for robots to work in proximity to humans, has drawn an analogy between today’s robots and human 1-year-olds, who can barely walk and frequently lose their balance and topple over.

The question is how quickly the robots will progress. In the case of self-driven vehicles, the rate of progress was much faster than predicted.

Although the original event ended in failure in 2004, just a year and a half later a number of the vehicles were able on their own to complete a long course over desert roads. In 2010, Google shook up the automotive industry with the news that it was testing self-driving cars on California’s freeways. Now, in the 2014 model year, a number of car companies will offer a feature known as “traffic jam assist” in which cars will drive autonomously in limited freeway situations.

To add realism to the 2013 Challenge event, Darpa officials have made it more difficult to control the robots by varying the amount of Internet bandwidth that is available to operators at its computer control station. In theory, that rewards teams whose designs are built around more self-guidance and punishes those who manually control or “teleoperate” their machines.

At the trials, some autonomy is on display. For example, the Atlas robot that was designed for seven of the teams by Boston Dynamics, a Massachusetts company, has the ability to walk on its own, as well as balance, a challenging robotics feat. The Schaft robot climbs over a debris field largely on its own, with the operator selecting the positions for the robot to place its feet, but the robot then taking the steps on its own.

Although the trials have shown so far that the teams are struggling to reach even the low bar that Darpa has set, there are expectations that a year from now, considerable progress will have been made. Indeed, at least one of the teams may try to automate their performance entirely next year.