Maybe These Aren’t the Droids We are Looking For

(inspirational music)

So, this week on the internet,

you may have seen some scary-looking humanoid robots,

that looked like they were messed-up on horse tranquilizers.

Because if you're trying to be human,

you may as well start out abusing horse tranquilizers.

They were actually part of a competition over the weekend,

put on by DARPA, the crazy research wing of The Pentagon.

Two dozen teams from around the World

put their robots through eight challenges,

including opening a door,

walking through rubble,

and, no joke, driving an ATV.

The whole idea here was to get roboticists thinking

about how to better design robots for rescue situations.

Theoretically, if a robot moves like a human,

it can better navigate things like

contaminated nuclear reactors,

which are obviously designed with human beings in mind.

There are already perfectly good robots that do this,

only, they run on tracks, kind of like tiny tanks.

But this means they can't do things

like climb a ladder, or drive an ATV.

Problem is, getting a robot to walk like a human

is really, really hard, as you might have noticed.

And these things are incredibly bulky, which is no good

if you want to use them to explore something

like a collapsed mine, or a parking garage,

where a robot needs to fit into tight spaces.

This brings us to an interesting question.

Why should the human body be the inspiration here at all?

What if there's a design, that doesn't

look anything like a human being,

but is able to navigate human structures just as well?

It's a question that has sharply

divided the robotics community.

Tracked vehicles have their advantages,

and one day humanoids will have theirs as well.

But what if there's a design that combines both?

Or better yet, we can stop our bickering

and realize that maybe, all of them can work in concert.

Rescuers already use tracked robots in collapsed mines.

And once the technology gets to the point

where they aren't 400 pounds and falling on their faces,

humanoids may work for operations

that require a human touch.

Or, we can just keep them as they are, for comic relief.

(inspirational music)