Tomorrow's robots drive, climb, and drill through walls at DARPA trials

This weekend 17 teams headed down to Homestead, Florida to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials, a gauntlet of eight tasks designed to test robots that could aid after natural disasters. Teams either built their own robots or wrote software to run on a Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. It sounds simple for some of the most advanced robots in the world, but only a few teams were able to score full points on any of the tasks, and three teams scored zero points despite spending over two hours trying. The winning robot was the humanoid HRP-2 robot built by Schaft, a Japanese company that was bought by Google this year.

via Tech News Headlines - Yahoo News http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/22/5235528/next-generation-robots-drive-climb-and-drill-through-walls-at-darpa