Competing in the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge as the SARBOT Team

Abstract

On October 25th 2012 DARPA anounced the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) kick off. The DRC is part of the US Department of Defense’s strategic plan to conduct humanitarian, disaster relief and related operations. The DRC particularly aims to promoting innovation in robotic technology (software and hardware) to improve the capability of ground robotic systems for disaster-response operations. Designed as a three-stage competition, the DRC started with a Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), where a selection of 26 teams proved their algorithms in a cloud-based simulated platform. The six best-performing teams in the VRC competition won an ATLAS humanoid robot to continue to the second stage of the DRC. This paper describes the work performed by one of the VRC competitors, the SARBOT Team.KeywordsDARPA Robotics ChallengeVirtual Robotics ChallengeDisaster Response OperationsHumanoids