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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400 US troops to train Syrian rebels to tackle the 31500 strong ISIS militants

#SyrianRebels #IraqiForces #KurdishForces It is understood that the US Department of Defense has agreed to send 400 troops and hundreds of support staff to train moderate rebels against the 31500 strong Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia have offered to host the troops but, it is not disclosed as to where they would be drawn from or where they will be based.
The announcement has come soon after senior US officials had met Syrian opposition leaders in Istanbul, Turkey. And, it is believed that imparting such training to the rebels would make them more effective to tackle the ISIS.
The objective of the US is to train more than 5,000 rebels annually for three years and the decision is an expansion in the US training of Syrian rebels which began in March 2013 in Jordan and led by the CIA.
Later, in October 2014 it had been announced that the project would be escalated and a parallel Pentagon program would be established.
US has already sent more than 3,000 troops to into Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish forces. But, critics of the training mission are of the opinion that the numbers are too small and too slow to be effective against IS which, the CIA feels, may have as many as 31,500 fighters.