In the event of another disaster at a nuclear power plant, the first responders may not be humans but robots. They may not even look humanoid.
The Pentagon's research and development agency is to announce a competition Tuesday to design specialized robots that can work in disaster zones while operating common tools and vehicles.
And while such tasks may well inspire humanoid designs, roboticists say they may also lead to the robotic equivalent of the Minotaur - a hybrid creature that might have multiple arms and not just legs but treads.
Rumors of the challenge have already set professional and amateur robot builders buzzing about possible designs and alliances. Aaron Edsinger, a founder of Meka Robotics in San Francisco, said he was speaking with fellow roboticists around the country and was considering a wide array of possible inspirations.
"Analogs to animals such as spiders, monkeys, bears, kangaroos and goats are useful inspiration when considering parts of the challenge," he said.
In the Tuesday announcement, the Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency, or DARPA, lists eight likely tasks the robot will need to perform - among them driving a vehicle to a simulated disaster site, moving across rubble, removing rubble from an entryway, climbing a ladder, using a tool to break through a concrete wall, finding and closing a valve on a leaking pipe, and replacing a component like a cooling pump.
Edsinger said the challenge would be not in completing any one of the tasks but rather in integrating them into a single mission.
"I feel we have already have systems that can achieve each individual task in the challenge," he said.
The idea for the competition came from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan a year ago, said Gill Pratt, a program manager in DARPA's defense sciences office.
"During the first 24 hours," he added, "there were things that should have been done but were not done because it was too dangerous for people to do them."
The agency has not announced how much it intends to spend on the program or how large the prize will be. It is calling the program a "robotics challenge," which is distinguished from a series of "grand challenge" events it held in 2004, 2005 and 2007, with $1 million and $2 million prizes for a contest to design autonomous vehicles to drive in desert and urban settings.
Corporate and university teams will compete to enter the robots in contests in 2013 and 2015. The robots will not need to be completely autonomous but rather will be "supervised" by human operators, much as ground-based pilots fly military drones.
The competition underscores the rapid progress being made in autonomous systems in military, manufacturing and home applications. Robotics researchers have said that these advances are largely a result of the falling cost of sensors, as well as developments in perception technologies that make it possible for robots to move in unplanned environments.
A number of ambitious humanoid robots have already been designed by industrial researchers. The Honda Asimo was unveiled in 2000 and by 2005 could operate for an hour on batteries. Last year it showed it could run as fast as 6 mph.
DARPA officials said they were hoping for international participation in the competition. Indeed, the challenge echoes a proposal made in November by Hirochika Inoue, the father of humanoid robot development in Japan.
Despite Japan's significant investment in robotics, he noted that the country did not have robots capable of completely replacing humans at the time of the Fukushima disaster.
"Many people wanted to do it by robots," he said in an email, "but we had not prepared."
In the United States, both General Motors and Boston Dynamics, a small research lab financed by the military, have developed humanoid robots. GM's Robonaut 2 is on the International Space Station, where it is being tested as an astronaut's assistant. Boston Dynamics, which has attracted attention for a transport robot called BigDog and more recently for a four-legged running robot called Cheetah, has a humanoid robot called Atlas.
In its announcement, DARPA says it will distribute a test hardware platform with legs, torso, arms and head to assist some of the teams in their development efforts. Several robot researchers said a version of the Boston Dynamics Atlas was a likely candidate for this role, but Pratt said his agency would also provide a software simulator to allow the widest possible participation in the challenge.
"We're opening the aperture as wide as we can," he said.
STATUES TO GOLEMS TO R2-D2
In proposing a competition to build remotely operated robots with human skills, the Defense Department is tapping into a deep vein of human fantasy and fear that goes back at least as far as Greek mythology - in which characters including Pygmalion, Daedalus and Hephaestus endowed statues with human qualities.
And while the goals for the Pentagon's Robot Challenge are humanitarian, mythology and literature tend to focus on the moral and philosophical contradictions of machines that can either help humans or harm them.
In the Middle Ages, Jewish folklore created the golem, an anthropomorphic creature assembled from inanimate matter - usually mud. In many tales the golems became violent.
Not surprisingly, Leonardo da Vinci probably designed the first modern robot, a mechanical knight operated by cables and pulleys that could stand, sit, raise its visor and move its arms. The military motif was perhaps an omen.
In 1818, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" raised the specter of machines running amok. But in keeping with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, written as part of a short story in 1942, many literary robots are designed to avoid harming humans; consider the lovable odd couple R2-D2 and C-3PO in George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies.
Still, given the rise of military drone aircraft that use artificial intelligence software in staging attacks, it seems unlikely that the next generation of humanoid robots will prove so benevolent.
The Pentagon's research and development agency is to announce a competition Tuesday to design specialized robots that can work in disaster zones while operating common tools and vehicles.
Rumors of the challenge have already set professional and amateur robot builders buzzing about possible designs and alliances. Aaron Edsinger, a founder of Meka Robotics in San Francisco, said he was speaking with fellow roboticists around the country and was considering a wide array of possible inspirations.
"Analogs to animals such as spiders, monkeys, bears, kangaroos and goats are useful inspiration when considering parts of the challenge," he said.
In the Tuesday announcement, the Defense Advanced Research and Planning Agency, or DARPA, lists eight likely tasks the robot will need to perform - among them driving a vehicle to a simulated disaster site, moving across rubble, removing rubble from an entryway, climbing a ladder, using a tool to break through a concrete wall, finding and closing a valve on a leaking pipe, and replacing a component like a cooling pump.
Edsinger said the challenge would be not in completing any one of the tasks but rather in integrating them into a single mission.
"I feel we have already have systems that can achieve each individual task in the challenge," he said.
The idea for the competition came from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan a year ago, said Gill Pratt, a program manager in DARPA's defense sciences office.
"During the first 24 hours," he added, "there were things that should have been done but were not done because it was too dangerous for people to do them."
The agency has not announced how much it intends to spend on the program or how large the prize will be. It is calling the program a "robotics challenge," which is distinguished from a series of "grand challenge" events it held in 2004, 2005 and 2007, with $1 million and $2 million prizes for a contest to design autonomous vehicles to drive in desert and urban settings.
Corporate and university teams will compete to enter the robots in contests in 2013 and 2015. The robots will not need to be completely autonomous but rather will be "supervised" by human operators, much as ground-based pilots fly military drones.
The competition underscores the rapid progress being made in autonomous systems in military, manufacturing and home applications. Robotics researchers have said that these advances are largely a result of the falling cost of sensors, as well as developments in perception technologies that make it possible for robots to move in unplanned environments.
A number of ambitious humanoid robots have already been designed by industrial researchers. The Honda Asimo was unveiled in 2000 and by 2005 could operate for an hour on batteries. Last year it showed it could run as fast as 6 mph.
DARPA officials said they were hoping for international participation in the competition. Indeed, the challenge echoes a proposal made in November by Hirochika Inoue, the father of humanoid robot development in Japan.
Despite Japan's significant investment in robotics, he noted that the country did not have robots capable of completely replacing humans at the time of the Fukushima disaster.
"Many people wanted to do it by robots," he said in an email, "but we had not prepared."
In the United States, both General Motors and Boston Dynamics, a small research lab financed by the military, have developed humanoid robots. GM's Robonaut 2 is on the International Space Station, where it is being tested as an astronaut's assistant. Boston Dynamics, which has attracted attention for a transport robot called BigDog and more recently for a four-legged running robot called Cheetah, has a humanoid robot called Atlas.
In its announcement, DARPA says it will distribute a test hardware platform with legs, torso, arms and head to assist some of the teams in their development efforts. Several robot researchers said a version of the Boston Dynamics Atlas was a likely candidate for this role, but Pratt said his agency would also provide a software simulator to allow the widest possible participation in the challenge.
"We're opening the aperture as wide as we can," he said.
STATUES TO GOLEMS TO R2-D2
In proposing a competition to build remotely operated robots with human skills, the Defense Department is tapping into a deep vein of human fantasy and fear that goes back at least as far as Greek mythology - in which characters including Pygmalion, Daedalus and Hephaestus endowed statues with human qualities.
And while the goals for the Pentagon's Robot Challenge are humanitarian, mythology and literature tend to focus on the moral and philosophical contradictions of machines that can either help humans or harm them.
In the Middle Ages, Jewish folklore created the golem, an anthropomorphic creature assembled from inanimate matter - usually mud. In many tales the golems became violent.
Not surprisingly, Leonardo da Vinci probably designed the first modern robot, a mechanical knight operated by cables and pulleys that could stand, sit, raise its visor and move its arms. The military motif was perhaps an omen.
In 1818, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" raised the specter of machines running amok. But in keeping with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, written as part of a short story in 1942, many literary robots are designed to avoid harming humans; consider the lovable odd couple R2-D2 and C-3PO in George Lucas' "Star Wars" movies.
Still, given the rise of military drone aircraft that use artificial intelligence software in staging attacks, it seems unlikely that the next generation of humanoid robots will prove so benevolent.
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