The Department of Defense’s strategic plan calls for the Joint Force
to conduct humanitarian, disaster relief and related operations. The
plan identifies requirements to extend aid to victims of natural or
man-made disasters and conduct evacuation operations. Some disasters,
however, due to grave risks to the health and wellbeing of rescue and
aid workers, prove too great in scale or scope for timely and effective
human response. The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) will attempt to
address this capability gap by promoting innovation in robotic
technology for disaster-response operations.
The primary technical goal of the DRC is to develop ground robots
capable of executing complex tasks in dangerous, degraded,
human-engineered environments. Competitors in the DRC are expected to
focus on robots that can use standard tools and equipment commonly
available in human environments, ranging from hand tools to vehicles,
with an emphasis on adaptability to tools with diverse specifications.
To achieve its goal, the DRC aims to advance the current state of the
art in the enabling technologies of supervised autonomy in perception
and decision-making, mounted and dismounted mobility, dexterity,
strength, and platform endurance. Success with supervised autonomy, in
particular, could allow control of robots by non-expert operators, lower
the operator’s workload, and allow effective operation even with
low-fidelity (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent) communications.
The DRC consists of both robotics hardware and software development
tasks and is structured to increase the diversity of innovative
solutions by encouraging participation from around the world, including
universities, small, medium and large businesses, and even individuals
and groups with ideas on how to advance the field of robotics. Detailed
descriptions of the participant tracks are available in the DRC Broad Agency Announcement.
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