European Team Being Formed For DARPA Grand Robotics Challenge

Image Source: DARPA

 Humanoid Robots

Davide Faconti, and the company Icarus Technology are forming an organization to compete in Track A of the DARPA Robotics Grand Challenge.  The team has fifteen months to design and build a highly-capable humanoid robot for the competition.

An organization has been formed to assemble a European team to compete in the DARPA Robotics Grand Challenge.  The team will participate in Track A of the challenge, which will involve creating both the hardware and software elements.

Track B of the robotics challenge will use a to-be-announced Boston Dynamics humanoid robot platform for hardware, so this means that there will be new, highly capable humanoid robots emerging from the DARPA challenge.  

DARPA plans to offer a $2 million prize to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the U.S. Department of Defence’s disaster recovery mission.  Teams are sought to compete in challenges involving staged disaster-response scenarios in which robots will have to successfully navigate a series of physical tasks corresponding to anticipated, real-world disaster-response requirements.

The initiative for the European entry is being currently promoted and coordinated by the company Icarus Technology, in particular by Davide Faconti, former CEO and technical project leader at Pal Robotics.

Davide Faconti wasn’t just the coordinator of the team which built the REEM series of robots, but also the main architect at the hardware level and the developer of thewalking algorithms of REEM-A and REEM-B. Currently, he is collaborating with the project BRICS on the development of best practices in Component Based  and Model Driven software development applied to robotics.
To accomplish the goal of the DARPA Grand Challenge in the given time-frame, a major effort in project and resource management is needed: we believe that Icarus Technology can provide a very valuable support in that part and, of course, an excellent experience in the design of biped robots with high payload (the arms of REEM-B have a rated payload of 6 Kg each).

The company Pal Robotics will eventually provide support and technical resources to our initiative, but it will not be directly involved, to avoid a potential conflict of interest.

DARPA Robotics Challenge schedule

The team will have nine months to present the robot’s design, and only six months after that to build, test, and prepare the robot for its first real-world trial in Disaster Response Challenge 1.

According to the organizer's website, "We believe that this challenge can be achieved only by brilliant, experienced and motivated people, working together to achieve a common goal. For this reason, we decided to launch this open call for participation to the entire community of researchers in robotics."



SOURCE  Plastic Pals

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