South Korea’s Team KAIST wins DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals

A robot from Korea's Team KAIST has won the $2 million DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. The robot is based on a Xenomai Linux and is called the DRC-Hubo.

It was among the only three bots that managed to complete the course on time. This week's DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals was held in Pomona, California, and was quite successful. It was judged by Silicon Valley's 'Failure rocks!' mantra. Just three teams were able to accomplish all eight major tasks in the allotted eight hours. There were 23 teams that participated in the event, which led to a disaster response scenario.

South Korea's Team KAIST won the game, bringing $2 million in prize money with its DRC-Hubo humanoid bot. DRC-Hubo from UNLV team that held eighth position also used a DRC-Hubo design. The $1 million second place prize was grabbed by the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) Robotics in Pensacola, Florida that brought a 'Running Man' version of the Atlas humanoid.

Third place, with an award of $500,000, was held by Carnegie Mellon's Team Tartan Rescue and its CHIMP robot. It seems that the CHIMP may also be a Linux-enabled robot.

According to Jun Ho Oh, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who led the KAIST Team, "Bipedal walking [for robots] is not very stable yet. One single thing goes wrong, the result is catastrophic. I thought about different things, and the simplest was wheels on the knees".

He said that a robot with a humanoid form is better when it works in a human environment, however he was looking forward to find a design that could reduce the risk of falls.