DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
I just learned about this. It is a competition of robot systems and software teams vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.
Teams from such places as Drexel University, NASA Jet Propulsion Labs, Carnegie Mellon University-NREC, NASA Johnson Space Center, Virginia Tech and MIT participate. Research and development of software, hardware, human-machine control interfaces that will enable their robots to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. As well as development of various sensors is the basis of the challenge.
The software portion of the competition was tested this past June.
Trials take place December 20-21 in which 8 tasks are to be performed by the robots. Vehicle, Terrain, Ladder, Debris, Door, Wall, Valve and Hose. The finals are said to occur at the end of 2014 and the winning team is set to receive a prize of $2 million.
The purpose for these robots is to assist in transforming the field of robotics and catapult forward development of robots featuring task-level autonomy that can operate in the hazardous, degraded conditions common in disaster zones.
Now this is interesting and innovative but in my opinion it is also quite frightening. It reminds me of the film I, Robot with the idea of robots having a mind of their own and taking over the world. Especially with a lot of them having a human like shape.
What do you think?
Techtacy 
