Abstract
The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) program conducted a series of prize-based competition events to develop and demonstrate technology for disaster response. This chapter provides the official and definitive account of DRC Finals as the culmination of the DRC program. The chapter details the eight tasks (Drive, Egress, Door, Valve, Wall, Surprise (Plug and Switch), Rubble (Obstacle or Debris), and Stairs) constituting the Challenge, and describes how the competition encouraged supervised autonomous operation by intentionally degrading the communications channel between the remote human operators. The chapter presents the results of the DRC Finals, and places those results in perspective by identifying both strengths and weaknesses of robot performance exhibited at the competition.
A version of this article was previously published in the Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 34, issue 2, pp. 229–240, © Wiley 2017.
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- 1.
The field computer is an optional computer (or multiple computers) that teams used to process data, for example, streams of images for visual odometry. The field computer served as a surrogate for the vastly improved computers that are expected to be available in the future and that could be built into future disaster-response robots.
- 2.
Network latency differs from round-trip ping (ICMP) times when traversing through the DCE. ICMP packets have a default file size (64 bytes with headers) which saturated the 9600 baud bandwidth limitation enforced on ICMP. As a result, pings typically took around 500 ms to reach their destination and respond back to the OCS.
References
DRC Finals Rules Book. Retrieved August 20, 2017, from http://archive.darpa.mil/roboticschallenge/sites/default/files/docs/2015_04_09_DRC_Finals_Rule_Book_DISTAR_24388.pdf.
DRC Finals Website. Retrieved August 20, 2017, from http://archive.darpa.mil/roboticschallenge/teams.html.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the significant contributions by Bob Allen, Josh Carter, Steve Cohen, Regina Courtney, Tim Kilbride, Brad Knaus, Tim Krout, Jason Livingston, Johanna Spangenberg Jones, Brant Revill, Chad Sullivan, DJ Tyree, Adam Watson, and the over three hundred DRC Trials and Finals staff.
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Krotkov, E. et al. (2018). The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals: Results and Perspectives. In: Spenko, M., Buerger, S., Iagnemma, K. (eds) The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals: Humanoid Robots To The Rescue. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74666-1_1
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