South Korea reveals its robotic skills – wins $2-million DARPA awards

South Koreans have proved heir robotic skills when a South Korean robotics team went on to win the Darpa Robotics Challenge of the US department of Defense. The contest was about a battle of robots on an obstacle course that was intended to simulate conditions similar to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster.
This has been reported in bbc.com dated 7 June 2015.
The South Korean Team Kaist's DRC-Hubo humanoid robot won the challenge by defeating 22 others and took home the grand prize of $2m prize from the DARPA research Unit of the US Department of Defense. The contest was held in Pomona, California.

The robots were given an hour to complete a number of tasks like driving a car and walking up steps and the challenge involved a series of tasks for the robots to complete. Their works was more or less autonomous and they had intermittent connectivity with their operators to simulate real disaster conditions.
It was the first time where the robots had the freedom to perform without being tethered.
Team Kaist turned out to be the fastest – it completed all the assigned tasks within 44 minutes and 28 seconds. Second was Team IHMC Robotics – they won $1m. Behind them, at 3d, was Tartan Rescue's Chimp robot – it won $500,000.
Teams from China and Japan could not turn up because while the former did not get their visas in time, the latter faced some technical problems due to an electronics accident during training.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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