The machines that rose to DARPA’s robotics challenge

The robot apocalypse has been postponed. At DARPA Robotics Challenge in California, where the world’s best and brightest robots came to compete, the machines were far from invincible. They moved at a glacial pace, stumbled and slammed to the ground and lay there motionless until their teams of humans came with a rig to pick them up. But their falls and flaws revealed how vulnerable they are, and actually made them seem more human in the process. These machines exhibited grit, intelligence and dexterity that could potentially make them stellar first-responders in disaster situations in the near future.

DARPA launched the robotics challenge as a response to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. And the agency’s been putting robots to the test for the last couple of years. It’s their way of pushing robotics to create advanced machines that can go in as first-responders instead of humans. Despite their benefits, though, robots are often dreaded. But the machines at the two-day robotics challenge had the crowd cheering wildly, gasping loudly and jumping out of their seats in support and anticipation.

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