On display in Homestead Friday, Valkyrie, submitted by NASA Johnson Space Center. Dion Nissenbaum/The Wall Street Journal
HOMESTEAD, Fla.—They have been portrayed by Hollywood as deadly Terminators. They have been vilified as future automaton armies, hunting humans without conscience.
But these imposing robots, their makers say, are just here to help.
As part of the Defense Department's multimillion-dollar campaign to design robots that can be deployed in disaster recovery situations, teams from around the globe brought their machines to a Florida racetrack for some cyborg competition. Photo: DARPA
If all goes as planned, machines named THOR, Valkyrie and Atlas will rush in where humans fear to tread, rescuing earthquake victims and turning off potentially catastrophic radiation leaks.
To help developers come up with the rescue robots of the future, the Defense Department has embarked on a multimillion-dollar campaign. Competitors squared off Friday on a Nascar racetrack in Florida, where they engaged in a kind of slow-motion robot contest for survival—and for more Pentagon money.
The robots are running through two days of challenges, from driving an all-terrain vehicle to turning off a valve to climbing a ladder. Afterward, the Pentagon will whittle down the field and pump more money into the top developers, who come from industry, government and academia.
A robot built by Japan's Schaft Inc. opening a door.Dion Nissenbaum/The Wall Street Journal
As part of the Defense Department's multimillion-dollar campaign to design robots that can be deployed in disaster recovery situations, teams from around the globe brought their machines to a Florida racetrack for some cyborg competition. Photo: DARPA
These first-generation robots won't be coming to the rescue any time soon. Nonetheless, interest in the field appears to be rapidly growing. Earlier this month,Google Inc. GOOG +1.32% bought several robotics companies, including two participants in Friday's Robotics Challenge Trials.
Google, which is investing in a commercial drone-delivery program and developing a driverless car, has tapped Andy Rubin, who led the development of Android software for smartphones, to oversee its efforts.
"We feel like this is the birth of the robotics boom," said Eric Meyhofer, part of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, which brought a 400-pound robot called Chimp to the competition.
Sixteen teams from around the world came to the Homestead-Miami Speedway to take part in the two-day event. As many as eight will be chosen to get as much as $1 million each for another year of work. Next year, the Pentagon plans to hand out $2 million to help the winner continue developing its robot.
The idea for the contest came from the Defense Department during the 2011 earthquake that spawned a radiation crisis at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant. Pentagon researchers wanted to build a robot that could have endured the radiation and more quickly contained its spread by venting reactors and preventing explosions.
It will be years before that dream becomes a reality. These robotsare still learning to open doors and walk on uneven ground. They have high design costs and limited capabilities. And a skeptical public raised on movies featuring deadly robots, still hasn't embraced the idea of working alongside a hulking machine.
"We are still a long way from having to worry about humanoid robots in our daily lives," said Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Automation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "And they will not show up on the battlefield for a very long time."
The limitations of the robots were evident Friday. Many struggled through the tests, with several top prospects falling short of their developers' expectations.
Gill Pratt, the Defense Department official overseeing the competition, said it is impossible to know when developers will reach a breakthrough that propels robots into widespread use.
"The technology needs to get better and the costs need to come down, but the costs won't come down until there's a market, which only exists if the technology is better," said Mr. Pratt, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon arm that is leading the robotics work.
There is another problem for these robots: Many of them are, in fact, scary. They look like big metallic spiders, faceless Storm Troopers, and soulless assassins from a dystopian future.
Hubo, from Drexel University, driving an ATV. Dion Nissenbaum/The Wall Street Journal
To address such concerns, developers at the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Lab in California have tried to create a "panda-police look," said Brett Kennedy, the team leader. At the moment, RoboSimian, the lab's entry in the contest, looks more like a black-legged spider than a cuddly mammal. "We don't want it to be too scary, and we also want it to be a piece of equipment that someone's going to want to pick up and use," he said.
Overcoming public resistance could be a challenge. Americans have expressed strong reservations about using unmanned drones in the U.S. And various groups want to see the government develop tight standards to regulate the use of robots that could be used to aid troops on the battlefield.
Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Tech's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, is developing a robot called THOR. He said it will be up to the nation's leaders to develop standards as the technology evolves. "It's not really about robotics or robots, it is an ethical problem of people who use them," he said.
On Friday, the robot competitors came with plenty of fans. One of the robots has been regularly tweeting about the competition. And Valkyrie, a six-foot-tall, 270-pound NASA robot named after the Norse goddess who decides who lives and dies on the battlefield, came with its own cheering squad.
Friends and family gathered in the stands with handmade signs in homage to the robot built by a NASA Johnson Space Center team.
"It just looks cooler," said Jaime Lien, a Stanford University graduate student, who carried a sign reading, "Valkyrie: You go girl!" sign to support her fiancée's work on the machine.
Despite its intimidating look, Valkyrie struggled on Friday. By day's end, the robot and its NASA team were in last place. A robot built by Japan's SCHAFT Inc., one of the companies recently bought by Google, led the pack.
Arati Prabhakar, Darpa's director, called Google's move into the field an "exciting" move that could "drive the robotics field forward."
She said that agency investments in breakthrough technologies have to remain a priority, even when it is faced with tighter budgetary times.
"Whether we're in peaceful times or times of war, whatever the budget situation, as a nation we have to make the investment for the next generation," she said.
