Robert Playter

Because a lot of people have asked that.

Why are you doing this?

You could have periods where the communication was entirely interrupted and the robot had to be able to proceed.

But you could provide some high-level guidance to the robot, basically low-bandwidth communications to steer it.

Well, so there was a contest where a bunch of different robots were asked to do a series of tasks, some of those that you mentioned, drive a vehicle, get out, open a door, go identify a valve, shut a valve, use a tool to maybe cut a hole in a surface, and then crawl over some stairs and maybe some rough terrain.

So it was...

The idea was have a general purpose robot that could do lots of different things.

Had to be mobility and manipulation on board perception.

And there was a contest which DARPA likes at the time was running sort of follow on to the grand challenge, which was let's try to push vehicle autonomy along, right?

They encourage people to build autonomous cars.

So they're trying to basically push an industry forward.

And we were asked, our role in this was to build a humanoid.

At the time, it was our sort of first-generation Atlas robot.

And we built maybe 10 of them.

I don't remember the exact number.

And DARPA distributed those to various teams that sort of won a contest, showed that they could program these robots, and then used them to compete against each other.

And then other robots were introduced as well.

Some teams built their own robots.

Carnegie Mellon, for example, built their own robot.

And all these robots competed to see who could sort of get through this maze the fastest.