NARRATOR: It's one of the most ambitious challenges
in the history of technology.
GILL PRATT: Ladies and gentlemen,
start your robots!
NARRATOR: The race to build robots that can save lives in a disaster.
That can even rescue us.
But to do that, they'll need to climb ladders,
walk over rubble, turn valves.
(cheering)
And no one knows if it's even possible.
RUSS TEDRAKE: There's so many things that could go wrong.
It's scary.
VIJAY KUMAR: When you try to instill human-like intelligence,
human-like manipulation skills into machines...
...it's just very, very hard to do.
NARRATOR: What will it take for robots to have...
...the right stuff?
And are we ready for the consequences?
SHERRY TURKLE: It's too easy to look at them and say,
"They're not there yet."
They will get to something very powerful,
and then you have to say, "Well, where will we have gotten to?"
AYANNA HOWARD: They might actually have the capacity
to be smarter than us.
NARRATOR: What impact will robots have on our future,
on how we work, how we interact,
even how we see ourselves?
"Rise of the Robots," right now on NOVA.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following...
We love science.
Supporting NOVA and promoting public understanding of science.
And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And by PBS viewers like you.
Thank you.
Additional funding for "Rise of the Robots"
is provided by the George D. Smith Fund.
NARRATOR: For decades, roboticists have wowed us
with their creations.
ROBOT: Do you have any questions?
NARRATOR: Especially in Japan, where bots are starting to cook for us,
do the laundry,
even sing and dance.
Some look so human, it's hard to tell us apart.
But looks can be deceiving.
People see these humanoid robots developed in Japan,
all these fancy things,
and they had the expectation that, "Oh, we have these robots
and they're going to, you know, save the world."
But that didn't happen.
NARRATOR: March 2011.
A devastating earthquake and tsunami rocked japan.
Explosions and fires
at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant
left the area dangerously radioactive.
Going inside, even for a few minutes, was life threatening.
It was the perfect time for Japan's cutting-edge robots
to come to the rescue.
But none did.
PAUL OH: The real tragedy was
if simply some valves could have been turned
or some switches could have been flicked
or hoses attached,
a lot of the meltdown could have been prevented.
The question was, when robots were needed the most,
just how come they weren't effective?
And so I think that led to a lot of self-reflection.
NARRATOR: After decades of research, where were our robot heroes?
For generations, science fiction
has portrayed robots as our loyal servants.
ROBBIE: Welcome to Altair IV, gentlemen.
I am to transport you to the residence.
NARRATOR: But it turns out our imagination
has taken us much further than our technology.
It's hard to create robots that can function in our world.
TONY STENTZ: One of the challenges
with deploying robots in the real world
is that the real world is like the wild, wild West.
It's very rich and complex and very unforgiving.
NARRATOR: What will it take
for robots to make their way out of the lab
and into the real world?
We're about to find out.
GILL PRATT: Ladies and gentlemen,
start your robots!
NARRATOR: At the most ambitious robotics competition in history.
ANNOUNCER: We welcome you to the DARPA robotics challenge.
This is where imagination meets innovation.
You have completed the course!
Whoo!
NARRATOR: In 2013, at a racetrack on the outskirts of Miami,
DARPA, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense,
challenged 16 teams from around the world
to build rescue robots that can help save lives in a disaster.
Very exciting, very exhausted,
very nervous and frustrated at the same time.
Dealing with robots is always like that.
NARRATOR: It's the kind of challenge DARPA is known for:
cutting-edge and high-risk.
DARPA was formed back in the 1950s
in response to the launch of Sputnik,
the world's first artificial satellite
built by the Soviet Union.
Since then, the agency has spent billions
developing military technology:
advanced weaponry like stealth technology,
drones, and night vision.
But the spin-offs from this research
have gone far beyond the military.
The Internet, GPS,
bionic arms, even Siri,
were all fueled with DARPA funding.
Cancel golf today.
SIRI: It's off your calendar.
Good.
NARRATOR: If these researchers succeed in creating rescue robots,
the same technology could be used to develop...
robots that take care of the elderly,
babysit our kids,
clean up after us.
Robots in almost every facet of life.
But first, can robots really help out in a disaster?
To find out, DARPA has set up an obstacle course for bots.
With human operators controlling their every move...
Yes, we got it!
NARRATOR: ...the robots must perform basic tasks,
like opening a door...
All right, go, go, go!
NARRATOR: ...turning a valve,
drilling a hole in a wall,
walking over rubble,
even driving a car.
Bot after bot takes their first steps into the real world.
And there's nothing easy about it.
NICOLAUS RADFORD: It's a monumental challenge.
I mean, DARPA calls it "DARPA hard."
I mean, I almost said it was "DARPA impossible."
NARRATOR: Robots fall off ladders.
Some barely move an inch.
They even struggle to open doors.
The things that a human can do instinctively, easily,
you don't realize how hard something like walking is
until you try to reproduce it in a machine.
PAUL OH: When my baby daughter took her first step,
did she walk?
No, she took a step and she fell down, right?
Over time, she started to walk, right?
And it's kind of like we're seeing here.
There are a lot of baby steps.
NARRATOR: After two days of competition...
...the results are not impressive.
But this is just the start of DARPA's grand experiment.
The agency is giving the roboticists
another chance to get it right,
and they're putting their money where their mouth is.
The top scoring teams in this first challenge
are receiving $1 million each to continue their work.
In 18 months, they will return for the final challenge
and the chance to win a grand prize of $2 million.
Yes!
GILL PRATT: It's not clear to me how well the teams are going to do.
It can't be too hard, because then everybody fails.
It can't be too easy,
because then it's not worth doing at all.
But if you make it just right...
Like Goldilocks, right?
I have tried to hit the sweet spot of difficulty,
but I think risking failure is the DARPA way.
NARRATOR: Will the challenge push the technology a giant step forward?
Will robots ever make their way through our world the way we do?
No!
RODNEY BROOKS: Back in the early '50s,
Alan Turing, one of the founders of artificial intelligence,
said that the best thing we could do was build a robot
with TV cameras for its eyes and motors to drive its legs
and have it romp around the countryside
and learn from the real world.
But he decided that was technologically too hard
back in the '50s, which it certainly was.
So he said, "Let's leave that physical interaction until later
"and let's work on more abstract problems,
the intelligence abstract problems."
NARRATOR: The field of artificial intelligence, or A.I.,
has already built machines that beat us at chess,
trade stocks with lightning speed,
and search for anything we want in an instant.
Yet when it comes to robotics,
progress has been painfully slow.
Some of the biggest problems robots face
are things we humans usually take for granted,
like mobility, manual dexterity,
and the ability to see and understand our environment.
These are the challenges the robotics teams will tackle
in the DARPA competition, beginning with mobility.
What's the best way to make a machine
that can move through our world?
Does it need to walk on two feet like us?
Some roboticists think the answer is yes.
HONG: The shape of the robot is dictated by what it needs to do.
There's a reason why the step size in your home is this big,
there's a reason why your door handle's this high,
because it's designed for humans to move around.
So unless the robot is the shape and size of a human,
it won't be able to navigate and move around
in the environment designed for humans.
NARRATOR: But getting around on two feet isn't easy, even for us.
It takes your average infant almost a year
to go from crawling to toddling to walking.
What does it take to give a robot
this intrinsic human ability?
It's one of the biggest problems facing roboticists today.
In Pensacola, Florida,
at the Institute for Human Machine Cognition, or IHMC,
one of the teams competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge
is hard at work developing its own software
to run this massive bot named Atlas,
a 385-pound powerhouse.
DARPA funded the design and development
of this rescue robot.
Several teams competing in the challenge
are using this hardware,
but writing unique software to guide their robot.
You might wonder why Atlas is so top-heavy.
Most of its oversized head is packed with cameras and sensors.
And while its feet may look small,
they're designed to fit in the kind of places we walk.
JERRY PRATT: With bipedal walking robots,
there's still a lot of strategies we have to determine.
And there's no known textbook solution yet.
It's more art than science still.
NARRATOR: For team leader Jerry Pratt,
finding the best way for a bipedal robot to walk
has not been easy or quick.
PRATT: Well, I've been working
on bipedal walking robots since 1994, so 21 years now.
NARRATOR: He started back in graduate school at the MIT Leg Lab,
where some of the most bizarre-looking bots
hopped, jumped, and flipped.
But the robots Jerry built were different
because they walked on two feet.
Using nature as his guide,
Jerry gave his bipeds hips, knees, and ankles
that mimicked how animals move.
This one, called Spring Flamingo,
had specially designed motors that worked a lot like muscles,
varying the amount of power each joint used.
Its legs and feet worked a bit like shock absorbers.
They had a little give.
PRATT: That robot was a really good workhorse.
We had it working for about three years,
probably walked about 20 miles or so.
NARRATOR: When it came to designing a humanoid,
he focused on developing
the perfect combination of hardware and software
that would enable his biped to stay upright
as it calculates the best way
to shift its center of mass,
lift its leg, swing it forward,
and put its foot back down in the right place
and with just the right amount of pressure.
To make these elaborate calculations,
the robot needs instructions,
lines of code that tell it how to move.
These lines of code are written
in a programming language that resembles English,
but for Atlas to use them, its onboard computer
has a program that translates them
into a language a machine can understand: zeros and ones.
It takes more than two million lines of code to run Atlas,
500,000 just to put one foot in front of the other.
It's the interplay of hardware and software
that keeps this bot on its feet,
an ability that took hundreds of thousands of years
of human evolution to perfect.
PRATT: We'll often look
at what strategies does a human use in order to walk
because the physics in the world that a human operates in
is the same as a robot.
NARRATOR: But we wouldn't be able to take a single step
without having some pretty amazing senses.
When you walk, your eyes detect the position of your body
relative to the world around it.
At the very same time,
a series of fluid-filled canals in the inner ear
tells your brain the position and motion of your head
so you know which way is up.
And a kind of sixth sense called proprioception
uses your muscles and nerves
to detect where your arms and legs are
in relation to each other.
All this information comes together
in a part of the brain called the cerebellum.
What kind of senses does Atlas use to walk on two feet?
For eyes, the bot has a stereo camera
and a couple of fisheye lenses
sticking out the side of its head,
along with a spinning laser called LIDAR
that scans everything in the world around it
and creates a 3-D model of its environment.
Atlas doesn't have an inner ear to tell it which way is up.
Instead, it uses a small cylinder in its butt
that contains gyros and accelerometers
that tell it where it is and how it's moving.
In addition, sensors on each joint tell Atlas
where its limbs are in relation to each other.
The result is an extraordinary sense of balance,
allowing Atlas to stand on one foot like a ballerina--
at least in the lab.
But in the real world,
Atlas's gyros and sensors aren't always enough.
PRATT: We only have a limited number of sensors on the robot,
whereas with a human or an animal,
you have thousands of little force sensors
on every square inch of your body.
NARRATOR: Over 100,000 just on the soles of your feet.
PRATT: You can step on something and detect what it is,
whereas the robots, they don't know that.
They just know they stepped on something.
NARRATOR: At the final challenge,
if Atlas should step on something the wrong way,
if the hardware and software don't work perfectly,
it will fall.
PRATT: We cannot get up from a fall currently,
and we probably won't survive a fall.
If we fall during the finals,
that may be the end of our whole weekend.
NARRATOR: Atlas isn't the only biped that has trouble staying upright.
Meet HUBO, designed and programmed
by cousins Paul Oh and Junho Oh.
At the first challenge,
HUBO clearly wasn't ready for the big, bad world.
PAUL OH: It's with fondness--
it's also with some pain-- that we think about it.
We went into the challenge with quite a lot of enthusiasm,
but when we got there,
it was just like one thing after another.
There were a lot of these real-world instances
that we did not experience in the lab.
That was a real awakening.
NARRATOR: Across the ocean
at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology,
Junho Oh is also doing some soul searching.
NARRATOR: After the shock wore off,
the cousins agreed to make a radical change
in the design of their biped.
PAUL HO: My cousin has come up
with this idea of adding wheels to HUBO's knees,
as well as casters on its toes.
And I call it the kneeling prayer mode.
Others like to call it wheeled mode
or transformer bot mode.
PAUL HO: Humans don't have wheels on the knees,
but there's no reason why we can't add that to a robot.
NARRATOR: When the cousins return for the final challenge,
they'll debut their humanoid, transformed
with the help of some clever engineering.
But for a robot to help out in a disaster,
getting there is just the first of many challenges.
To assist rescue workers in the real world,
it needs hands
with the kind of strength and dexterity it takes
to lift heavy hoses,
drill into walls,
solder and saw.
It needs a pair of these.
OLIVER BROCH: Our experience of the human hand
is that we can do everything with it.
We can dig ourselves through rubble,
we can make really nice paintings, we can knit.
The human hand really distinguishes our species
from all other species.
If you look at the way humans manipulate objects,
we have this instinct for tactile sensing,
for feeling the world.
Understandably so,
we've had over 200,000 years of human evolution
to get to this particular point.
NARRATOR: Is it possible to translate a masterpiece of evolution
into motors, cables, sensors, and thousands of lines of code?
On the outskirts of London, behind an unassuming storefront,
a small group of robot enthusiasts
are building a robotic hand
that they hope could one day rival our own.
ARMANDO DE LA ROSA T.: When we first started building a hand,
we actually bought anatomy books
and tried to understand how the hand works.
We thought it would be good if we could copy,
as best we can, the human hand.
RICH WALKER: The Shadow Hand was built with the idea of trying
to get as close as possible to the human hand,
but as engineers.
NARRATOR: Like the human hand,
this robotic version has four fingers and a thumb.
It's about the same size as the original
and can even shake like one,
but that's where the similarities end.
We pack a huge amount of sensing and actuation.
We have 25 joint position sensors,
nine analog digital converters.
We have two tendons coming from each joint
to a motor in the forearm.
20 motors in the forearm.
Each motor has a temperature sensor,
a current sensor, and two full sensors
so we can tell how hard the motor is working
and how hard it's driving the tendons.
We put contact sensing in the fingertips
so we can tell that we've touched something.
So there is a wealth of computing power
just to get something that has
the same set of movements as your hand.
NARRATOR: And with this level of dexterity,
it can do a lot more than card tricks.
DE LA ROSA T.: We have this hand handling pipettes and lab equipment,
removing the human from the risk--
for example, people that work
with very, very nasty bacteria and viruses.
NARRATOR: The Shadow Hand was designed for delicate tasks,
not for dirty jobs like this.
WALKER: When you look at where robot hands get used,
you find people who want to do
something delicate and precise...
...and people who want something big and rugged and solid.
NARRATOR: For the robots in the DARPA challenge,
strength and precision are a must.
Finding the balance between them
has been a struggle for team leader Brett Kennedy,
who developed this four-legged rescue robot named Robosimian,
here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
My first intuition is that this needed to be a very robust hand,
and I was thinking, "Well, robust means big."
"Why don't you go find out how big Wilt Chamberlain's hand is
and make a hand that big?"
So if anybody's curious,
Wilt Chamberlain's hand is very, very big,
and not only is it very, very big
when you make a robotic version of it,
it actually cannot deal with normal human-scale tools.
NARRATOR: So they modify their design,
making a smaller hand with just three fingers.
KENNEDY: This does everything we needed it to in the competition.
It grabbed everything, the human tools.
So we thought we were in pretty good shape.
NARRATOR: But then, at the first challenge,
Robosimian had to open a door, and things got messy.
So here's an individual finger, and in that individual finger,
there is an artificial tendon, a synthetic fiber.
When excessive forces happen, it snaps.
NARRATOR: When Kennedy realized Robosimian's fingers
couldn't provide the strength he was looking for,
he came up with a radically different idea.
KENNEDY: So this is the "cam hand."
To do most of the work that we need to,
a simple hook works just fine
so that we can actually get a grasp
and we can hold on to most everything we have to.
The fact of the matter is this is a very simple, dumb system.
It closes until it encounters something,
and then that will hold it, and it'll hold it securely.
NARRATOR: In their quest to grasp victory,
the teams competing in the DARPA Challenge
will rely on all kinds of hands.
Many are using this gripper, designed with three fingers
that can wrap around a variety of objects
and even pick up something small.
If we look at tasks like, for instance, opening a door
or using a drill, using hand tools and things,
pretty much all these tasks you can perform using three fingers.
NARRATOR: Robotic grippers have already made their way
onto the factory floor, attached to massive robotic arms
that are as robust as they are precise.
They build cars, lift heavy boxes,
pack beer,
sort through anything and everything,
from batteries to pancakes,
doing the kind of jobs many people consider repetitive
and downright boring.
But some experts fear
as robots move beyond the factory into the real world,
they'll take on a lot more.
I think that we will lose at least 20% or 30% of our jobs
over the next 20 years, and probably more.
Fast food workers are mostly going to be replaced.
The cashiers at Wal-Mart,
their jobs aren't going to last that much longer.
The first to go are going to be drivers.
Uber is spending a lot of money on driverless cars.
Google is spending a lot of money.
Now Toyota is.
40 years from now, there are not going to be a lot of jobs.
NARRATOR:But not eves the future looks quite so grim.
Over the past century, while robots and automation
took over many manufacturing jobs,
other kinds of jobs have increased.
Some think that trend will continue.
TERESA GHILARDUCCI: Machines in all of modern economic history
have helped create jobs,
not taken them away.
Machines are complements to workers, not substitutes.
They come together and enhance the productivity of each.
They need each other.
NARRATOR: Today, more and more jobs require humans
to work side by side with robots on the assembly line,
programming them
and repairing them.
Technology creates new jobs.
But only for those who have the skills to adapt.
What happens to the workers left behind?
GHILARDUCCI: The worker who was displaced has to be compensated
through retraining or through a pension.
So that's a social problem,
not a problem rooted in technology.
MARCUS: People should already be thinking
about what kind of society we would want
if not everybody can have jobs.
NARRATOR: Many ethicists say we should also be thinking
about which jobs we want to hand over to machines.
RONALD ARKIN: Much of the things that we are creating
can be used for a whole broad range of potential applications,
ranging from eldercare and childcare robots
to healthcare robotic platforms, even surrogate sex objects.
What is acceptable?
NARRATOR: What impact these high-tech machines will have
in the workplace and our homes remains unclear.
But one thing's for sure:
robots are starting to take their first baby steps
out of the lab and into the real world,
learning how to manipulate objects we use every day.
But for a rescue robot to be truly useful,
there's another hurdle researchers face,
the toughest one of all:
the challenge of giving a machine
the ability to understand its environment--
to give it a brain.
MATT JOHNSON: Our robot doesn't really have what you'd call a brain.
He's not seeing the world, he's not perceiving the world.
It's not thinking, it's not reasoning.
You know, it's pretty dumb.
NARRATOR: In fact, today's rescue robots are so dumb,
DARPA permits human operators to guide them, step by step.
The bot waits for instructions that tell it what to do--
those zeros and ones that computers understand.
The instructions travel through an elaborate pipeline
that connects every piece of hardware,
every motor and sensor,
to a computer controlled by a team of human operators.
The operators communicate with their robots
via a wireless connection,
just like they would at a real disaster.
And at the final challenge.
These operators at Carnegie Mellon University
are about to guide their rescue robot, named CHIMP,
through one of the skills it needs to master
for the final DARPA Challenge: turning a valve.
Using six different cameras
located on the front and back of its head
and a spinning sensor called LIDAR,
the bot sends data about its environment to the operators.
A 3-D image of CHIMP's world appears on their monitors.
CHIMP has no idea what it's looking at,
so with the click of a mouse,
the humans tell it exactly where the valve is.
CLARK HAYNES: Things like recognizing objects,
that's a very hard problem in robotics.
So we let the human tell the difference
between a cat and a dog, a valve and a door.
NARRATOR: Next, they show CHIMP where to grab the valve,
which way, and how far to turn it.
But it would be impossibly slow and impractical
for the operators to tell CHIMP how to move every joint,
every sensor, every motor of its complex arm.
This job must be done by the robot all on its own.
Using a process called "motion planning,"
CHIMP determines the best path for its arm to travel.
It shows the operator what its intentions are,
what its path will be, how it's going to get there.
There's a plan.
In the end, it's going to be
you say, "Okay, I approve your plan.
CHIMP, go ahead and do your thing," and off it goes.
HAYNES: As we move towards developing this technology further,
we really want to push on the robot autonomy
and let CHIMP do more things on its own,
but we always want to keep this as a tool for a human.
NARRATOR: In other words, keep the human in the loop and in control.
But that's not every team's goal.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Russ Tedrake is taking a different approach.
He is determined to give his Atlas robot
as much autonomy as he can to make it a whole lot smarter.
TEDRAKE: Our goal as researchers,
especially in this artificial intelligence lab,
we want to solve the long-term research questions
about how to make autonomous robots.
This is the closest we've ever come
to building an artificial intelligence machine,
where this humanoid robot is moving through the world,
solving real problems.
NARRATOR: At a disaster,
where you can't always count on a wireless connection,
the smarter the bot gets, the more it can do on its own.
To create a more autonomous robot,
Tedrake is developing software that helps it find
and identify objects with a bit more independence.
So if the robot is just looking at my kitchen at home,
there are dishes everywhere,
and you ask the robot to find a spoon.
That's a really hard question.
If the human just says,
"There's a spoon roughly over here, click,"
and he just has to look in a little patch of space
for something that's roughly the same shape as a spoon,
that takes an extremely hard problem of object recognition
in a complicated environment
and turns it into a very simple problem of,
"Okay, I want to look for spoon-shaped things
in this small region of space."
NARRATOR: While CHIMP needs its human operators
to tell it exactly where a valve is and where to grab it,
MIT's Atlas is programmed to recognize a valve on its own,
figure out the steps it needs to take as it approaches,
then grab and turn it with very little human help.
TEDRAKE: We can put it in an autonomous mode
and basically just watch the robot execute.
It shows us what it's about to do.
We could always stop it
if it looked like it was going to do something wrong,
but when things are going well,
the robot's operating almost completely autonomously.
There's no real input
coming from us to the robot at this point.
It's just going on with its task.
NARRATOR: A more self-sufficient robot
could potentially help save more lives in a disaster.
But just how independent do we want rescue robots to get?
What if an autonomous robot enters a disaster
and has to decide who lives and who dies?
It's the kind of moral dilemma that gave Will Smith nightmares
in the movie I, Robot.
ROBOT: You are in danger!
NARRATOR: When a bot chose to save his life
over the life of an 11-year-old girl.
Save the girl! Save her!
I was the logical choice.
It calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival.
Sarah only had an 11% chance.
11% is more than enough.
A human being would have known that.
NARRATOR: While today's cutting-edge machines,
like the thousands of drones used by the U.S. military,
still have a human in the loop,
what happens in the future if they don't?
AYANNA HOWARD: There's conversations going on right now,
conversations about, what are the ethical laws of robots?
How far should we really push this technology?
PETER SINGER: How much autonomy do we want to give this new technology?
Even the semi-autonomous ones
raise certain interesting issues,
like, who's to blame when something goes wrong?
These systems will not be foolproof,
they will not be perfect.
It's important to remember that.
NARRATOR: How these robotic technologies, autonomous or not,
will be used on the battlefield of the future
remains an open question.
But now, just a week before the final challenge,
the roboticists are starting to feel the mounting pressure.
Brett Kennedy, who leads the Robosimian team,
is no exception.
KENNEDY: I really have no idea
how we're going to place within the overall field
at the robotics challenge.
All the researchers that are bringing their teams
are top flight,
so where we end up in that, I don't know.
NARRATOR: Will Jerry Pratt's years of research with bipedal robots
finally pay off?
Will Paul Oh and Junho Oh redeem themselves
after HUBO's poor performance at the first challenge?
NARRATOR: Is CHIMP's combination of hardware and software
just what its human operators need?
Or will more autonomy help or hinder the team from MIT?
TEDRAKE: There're so many things that could go wrong.
Geez, the chance that the robot could break,
or something that worked 99 out of 100 times,
but we get unlucky...
It's scary.
NARRATOR: June 5, 2015.
Our roboticists meet once again,
this time at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds.
Over the next two days,
they'll face off with finalists from around the world.
Several teams come from Korea and Japan.
This little robot comes from Germany.
Most are funded through government
or corporate sponsorship, but some bots,
like this odd-looking one called Cog-Burn,
are funded by the teams themselves.
Yeah, of course.
Very stiff competition,
looks like there are a lot of good teams,
probably be a lot that make it all the way through the course,
so it will come down to top speed.
NARRATOR: To win, each robot must perform a series of tasks
a lot like the ones they faced in the first challenge,
from driving a car, to drilling a hole in a wall,
to walking over debris, to tackling a flight of stairs.
The robot that completes the course
in the shortest time wins.
That puts a lot of pressure
on the operators to keep their bots moving.
And DARPA has thrown another wrench into the mix.
Just like at a real disaster,
the power of the wireless connection
between the operators and their robots fluctuates.
Sometimes, the robots will receive a degraded signal,
just bits and pieces of the data that tells them what to do.
Other times, no data, no instructions at all.
DARPA is hoping this will push the roboticists
to develop more autonomous systems,
bots that can finish a job without our help.
But what makes the final challenge
downright nerve-wracking is that unlike the first competition,
where the bots were tethered,
this time around, there are no safety lines allowed,
putting these multimillion- dollar machines
in real jeopardy.
GILL PRATT: What I was worried about
is that almost none of the teams
had tested their robots off the safety tether.
We had no idea when these robots fell
how badly they would break,
so many of the teams were really scared.
NARRATOR: Finally, the competition begins.
Each robot has two chances to run the course.
IHMC starts their first run.
The robot drives without a hitch.
Walks up to the door with ease.
(audience cheering)
All right, go through the door.
NARRATOR: All is looking good.
Just two more tasks to go.
Nice.
(audience groans)
No!
NARRATOR: It's Jerry's worst nightmare.
After years of perfecting his walking software,
a tiny misstep in the real world
brought one of the most advanced robots on earth to its knees.
PRATT: Nobody was really sure
if the Atlas robot would survive a fall.
You know, we've never had Atlas fall before today.
NARRATOR: The team worries the bot can't be repaired
in time for its final run.
For Carnegie Mellon's robot, CHIMP,
the day is also filled with ups and downs.
MEYHOFER: When he fell down through the door,
you know, he's laying there and we were just, "Oh no."
NARRATOR: Back in the garage, the operators scramble
to find a way to get the red bot back up on its treads again.
But the bigger a bot, the harder it falls.
Smaller robots fall without breaking
and have truly bizarre ways of getting back up again.
But they're too small to do the kind of heavy lifting
rescue robots need to do at a disaster.
HONG: Once you make it heavier and larger,
you need stronger motors,
and stronger motor means heavier motors,
and heavier motors increase the overall weights.
NARRATOR: CHIMP weighs over 400 pounds.
That's an awful lot of robot to lift.
The crowd begins to wonder if its run is done.
JOHN MARKOFF: I found it fascinating
to watch the crowd watching the robots.
This was really an emotional moment.
They're collections of wires and gears and motors,
and we were sympathizing with them at a very basic level.
RRATOR: Then CHIMP's leg begins to move.
MEYHOFER: This little kid down in the front screams,
"He's getting up!"
(cheering)
NARRATOR: The bot not only gets up, it completes all eight tasks,
becoming the first robot to finish the course.
But not every team is so lucky.
As MIT starts its run,
hoping to show off its robot's autonomy,
things run amok in the control room.
We made a simple operator error.
When we went to get out of the car,
we forgot to turn off the driving controller,
so the foot tried to push the throttle
when it was getting out of the car.
(audience groans)
NARRATOR: In an effort to drive and get out of the car at the same time,
the robot keels over and breaks its right arm.
TEDRAKE: But the operators
were able to recover
and do basically the entire course left-handed.
NARRATOR: The robot is still able to do most of the tasks,
but it faces one insurmountable problem:
the team has programmed it to use two hands
to pick up the drill and turn it on.
It can't do that when one of its hands is broken.
Without completing all the tasks,
team MIT has no chance of winning.
A weary team IHMC
has worked through the night trying to fix its robot.
Somehow, the robot's still working,
but the fall we took did something with the robot
where he's kind of all messed up a little bit.
NARRATOR: There's something wrong with its LIDAR,
the system that scans the robot's environment.
PRATT: The operator is going to have to adjust on the fly
and compensate in his head for the errors in our sensors.
Are we really leaning that much?
Our strategy is still what it was yesterday:
eight points or bust.
NARRATOR: The time has come for their final run.
All right!
NARRATOR: They make it through all the tasks
and approach the dreaded debris
where they fell on their first run.
All right, you gotta swing the right first.
NARRATOR: But this time, they succeed.
The operator guides their robot all the way up the stairs,
finishing the course in record time.
Yes!
You know, having a human in the loop,
you've got a supercomputer up here.
Humans can adapt to just about anything.
Eight points confirmed!
NARRATOR: The team is now in the running for first place.
But a one-of-a-kind bot
could still give them a serious run for their money.
Cousins Paul and Junho are each competing with their own robot,
doubling the chances that one of their humanoids on wheels
will win the day.
Paul's team makes it as far as the drilling task
until the drill gets stuck, overheats, and shuts down.
But cousin Junho's team moves on.
(applause)
Their robot completes all the manual tasks
by rolling on its knees or standing on its feet.
(cheering)
But when it approaches its final task, the stairs,
it suddenly stops.
Back in the garage, its human handlers
are double- and triple-checking the instructions
they're about to send their robot.
A mistake here will cost them the competition.
NARRATOR: Their job is done.
All they can do now is watch and wait.
Finally, HUBO starts to climb the stairs
unlike any human on earth,
with its head facing forward and its feet facing back.
The humanoid on wheels ufinishes all eight tasks,
faster than any other robot.
Junho Oh's robot HUBO wins the day.
IHMC comes in second.
Team CHIMP, from Carnegie Mellon, comes in third.
These bots may have moved slowly, but just like a toddler,
they're taking baby steps into our world.
BROOKS: We tend to think
the world today is what it's going to be like
in ten years and twenty years.
But if we look back ten years what we have,
look back twenty years what we have,
the world has been totally transformed.
It's really hard for us
to imagine how different it's going to be.
VIJAY KUMAR: In some ways, the change in the field
has been very incremental, but in other ways,
it's been completely unpredictable.
SHERRY TURKLE: It's too easy to look at them and say,
"Oh, they're not there yet."
Well, they will get to something very powerful.
And then you have to say, "Well, where will we have gotten to?"
NARRATOR: In fact, a few months after the finals,
Boston Dynamics, the makers of the Atlas robot,
took this updated version for a stroll
in a snow-covered woods.
While it stumbles,
it quickly recovers its balance just as we would.
TURKLE: I think we just need to approach this
with our eyes open and understand our vulnerability
to a technology that we are on the cusp of creating.
NARRATOR: There's no question that developing rescue robots
with the potential to save lives makes a lot of sense.
But the potential for other applications remains unclear.
The time is now to think about their role in our lives,
as we face the "Rise of the Robots."
NEIL ARMSTRONG: That's o access.wgbh.orgr man..H
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