It's Saturday evening, and mere moments ago, the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials officially ended. We'll have more DRC coverage for you over the next few days, and lots more video, but we wanted to bring you the results of the Trials just as soon as they were announced, which should be any moment now.
Have a look at our earlier post on events and scoring for a sense of what these numbers mean, but the important bits are that each task was worth a maximum of four points, and time is only a factor if there's a tie. Otherwise, robots were free to use the entire 30 minutes for each task, and they were also free to end a task at any point (or not compete at all). And here are the final scores, just posted by DARPA:
Now, here's why the scores matter, as far as the teams (and DARPA) are concerned:
Up to eight teams will move forward with DARPA funding to compete in the DRC Finals in 2014, while other teams will also be welcome to compete using independent sources of funding.
So the the top eight teams that will get funded through to the finals in 2014 are:
1. SCHAFT
2. IHMC Robotics
3. Tartan Rescue
4. MIT
5. RoboSimian
6. Team TRACLabs
7. WRECS
8. Team TROOPER
DARPA says each team may get up to 1 million dollars, but contract negotiations will happen first. We'll get you more details on the funding when they're available. We'll also get you detailed scoring breakdowns as soon as DARPA posts them. For now, here are some awards DARPA announced:
Best in Task Awards:
Vehicle: WRECS
Terrain: SCHAFT
Ladder: SCHAFT
Debris: SCHAFT
Door: IHMC Robotics
Wall: IHMC Robotics
Valve: THOR
Hose: SCHAFT
Gill Pratt just got a standing ovation from everyone, and said,
"I've been telling the media over the past couple of months that I would be thrilled if even one of the teams scored even half of the points in the DRC trials. It runs out that four of the teams scored more than half. This has been an incredible event that has exceeded my expectations multiple, multiple times."
Heck yeah.
The official post-event press conference is scheduled to start at 7 pm, and we'll update this post with additional info (including, we hope, the plan for 2014) as soon as we get it.
