Robot Battle For The Big Leagues: Valkyrie And The DARPA Challenge





30 thoughts on “Robot Battle For The Big Leagues: Valkyrie And The DARPA Challenge

  1. I gotta say, I was expecting to see more shots of the robot, I dunno… doing stuff? Yay for cool robot clothes and all, but seeing it take half a step and grab a steering wheel just didn’t meet my expectations somehow.

  2. The NASA JPL team did well in the simulation precursor to the full challenge, the VRC (Virtual Robotics Challenge). They posted an overview video of their demo, which is a hilarious collection of dumb but simple workarounds they figured out to accomplish the tasks (crab-walking, deliberate collisions with terrain, etc). The message of the video is that most of the work they did was brute force trial and error specific to the simulation, but useless in the challenge and indeed in the real world – in fact, they say the only “clever” algorithm they developed scored the worst out of all the tasks.

    They seem to be saying that the DARPA robotics challenge is a series of artificially difficult tasks, and the solutions to which won’t really benefit robotics as a whole (as a robotics researcher, I agree). Also watch to the end to see a nod to the BigDog Beta parody video…

    1. You’re assuming that that’s how it stands; it could be braking them, it could have ratchet-like mechanisms though that’s less likely from what I could see. Braking is most probable, since it leaves the smallest chance of just falling over and breaking if it runs out of power, takes the least power to accomplish, and can be a default no-power state.

  3. What we need is a requirement that anyone building a robot, capable of overthrowing mankind in it’s current configuration or not, publish specs that clearly show where to shoot it to make it stop overthrowing mankind. And why does it have boobs?

    1. Because Valkyries are female. Where did you think the name came from? :V

      I think it was an attempt to make it a bit more endearing, maybe soften that muscular storm trooper thing it has going on.

      Can we please stop with the “SKYNET LOL” every time a post has a robot? Setting aside the plausibility of robots up and gaining sentience, the whole point of Terminator was that the super computer that controlled nuclear missiles and so forth turned on mankind after people responded to it gaining self awareness by trying to pull the plug. Those movies had a lot to say for action flicks, and it’s kind of depressing that what a lot of people took away seems to be just “robots can’t be trusted.”

      It’s like how people call Frankenstein a story of science run amok when the whole point is that the creature *wasn’t evil before his creator fucking abandoned him.*

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