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14th December 2013

Valkyrie: NASA's superhero robot

The DARPA Robotics Challenge is a $2 million prize competition run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Open since October 2012 and concluding in December 2014, it aims to develop robots that can do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments."

Among the competing entries is "Valkyrie" – a humanoid machine being developed by NASA. This is a variant of the earlier "Robonaut" that was delivered to the International Space Station in February 2011. As seen in the video below, it now features legs and interchangeable arms with 44 axes of movement, alongside a wide array of cameras and sensors. Valkyrie will eventually walk around untethered, pick up and manipulate objects while navigating a variety of terrain and even have the ability to drive vehicles.

In the future, it is hoped that robots like Valkyrie will be used in missions to Mars. Nicolaus Radford, Principal Investigator and team leader of the NASA JSC Dextrous Robotics Lab: "NASA saw a considerable overlap between what the DRC was trying to accomplish and NASA's goals as an agency. We want to get to Mars. Likely, NASA will send robots ahead of the astronauts to the planet. These robots will start preparing the way for the human explorers, and when the humans arrive, the robots and the humans will work together."

For more information, see the official website.

• In a related story, Google yesterday acquired Boston Dynamics, which has multi-million dollar contracts with DARPA and is behind such robots as ATLAS, BigDog and PETMAN. This is just the latest in a whole series of robotics companies recently bought by Google.

 

 

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