as it hopped seemingly impatiently, waiting for the man
with the joystick to drive it forward and then backwards a
bit. Then, I was at first quite amused and then a bit upset
when someone — probably one of the robot’s builders —
gave it a swift hard kick, knocking it back a few feet. It
staggered but did not fall over.
Next, it was pelted several times with dodgeballs. It
recoiled from the impact but still remained standing. I had
seen that kind of thing done with the Big Dog robot, but to
see this bird-like robot get kicked and pelted with
dodgeballs made me feel bad for the strong and nimble
steel animal.
My head knew that no animal was really being hurt,
but my heart wanted to tell that bully to stop tormenting
the steadfast motorized creature; to let the poor beastie
be!
Notable Robots —
Winners and Losers
IHMC’s Running Man (an Atlas robot) — who came in
second in the competition — drove its car so smoothly and
so swiftly, I truly believed for that moment I was watching
the genesis of the age of robotics. Of course, when it took
him three and half minutes to exit the Polaris and another
three minutes of painfully slow walking to get from the
car to the door opening task, I was quickly disabused of
that idea. Yet, everything has a beginning and with so
much time, effort, and money going into robotics these
days, this very well may be the beginning of the age of
robotics.
Team Grit from Colorado was another impressive
robot. Not in its scoring or timing — no. It caught my
SERVO 08.2015 63
Team Name City Company/ College Score Time
1st Place TEAM KAIST DRC-HUBO Daejeon, South Korea KAIST HuboLab & Rainbow Co. 8 44:28:00
2nd Place TEAM IHMC ROBOTICS Running Man Pensacola, FL Institute for Human and Machine Cognition 8 50:26:00
3rd Place TARTAN RESCUE Chimp Pittsburg, PA Carnegie Mellon University 8 55:15:00
TEAM NIMBRO RESCUE Momaro Bonn, Germany University of Bonn 7 34:00:00
TEAM ROBOSIMIAN RoboSimian Pasadena, CA Nasa JPL 7 47:59:00
TEAM MIT Helios Cambridge, MA Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 50:25:00
TEAM WPI-CMU WARNER Worcester, MA and Pittsburgh, PA Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon University 7 56:06:00
TEAM DRC-HUBO AT UNLV Metal Rebel Las Vegas, NV Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering 6 57:41:00
TEAM TRAC LABS Hercules Webster, TX TRACLabs 5 49:00:00
TEAM AIST-NEDO HRP2+ Ibaraki, Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology 5 52:30:00
Table 1. Top 10 DRC Teams.
