DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials Push the Limits of Very Slow Humanoid Robots

Although it may come as a shock to some prominent futurists, the ongoing DARPA Robotics Challenge this weekend shows that we truly are in the early days of humanoid robotics. Throughout the day, a live telecast of the beginning of the competitive robotic events was available to anybody who cared to watch. The event drew around 4,000 live remote viewers on YouTube, plus 17 robots, a sizable staff, and most likely a determinably exotic hodgepodge of high-tech VIPs. The event pushed bleeding-edge humanoid robots to cut and knock out portions of drywall, navigate obstacle courses, and drive ATVs. And our robotic brainchildren are a little slow on the uptake, apparently.

Some of the robots could not even manage to open a door, a task already mastered by cats, let alone grab and screw in a firehose.

It's a regular thing to spend 15 minutes staring at the nozzle before you touch it, right guys?

Although the robotic technology on display is indisputably on the cutting edge of robotic research, the 30-minute window allowed per-activity and the need for spare legs, circuitry, and high-ranking governmental researchers belies the primitive state of things. More than a few of the 17 "olympiads" had to default out of some of the events, such as NASA/JPL creation RoboSimian which was unable to operate an ATV. One of the members of the RoboSimian team did report during the live broadcast that it was likely for RoboSimian to possess this ability, as well as a few others, within the next few years. Other robots are not so lucky, and will fall prey to the inevitable entropy of the super-complex highly-nonlinear real world that humankind is relegated to live in. 

To some, the DARPA Robotics Challenge portends a huge leap forward in robotic technology and the human capacity to create lifelike machines which perform useful functions in the real world. This future world inhabited by many thinking, autonomous machines is under hot debate, however, in both academic and informal circles. 

The nature of artificial consciousness, of embedding in essence spirit and intention into nonhuman mediums, is mercurial, fascinating and ultra-deep. As evidenced by the challenge trials today, there are no experts, and entry-level research requires a highly diversified panoplia of specialities, including but certainly not limited to mechanical engineering, robotics, the philosophy of science, neuroscience, neurobiological feedback networks, OOP, natural language processing, qualitative and statistical research methods of cognitive modeling, and most likely a knack for science fiction literature. Although today's humanoid robots forthrightly require human input to guide them, it is within the general goals of AI to see to it that this will not always be the case. 

We're a little far off from having the robots do this.

As many optimistic AI researchers will tell you, achieving synthetic consciousness probably is not impossible. It is also not necessarily without a lot of economic momentum behind it. While we wait for nonhuman, yet highly intelligent objects to begin appearing in our world, there are a lot of other things we could prepare for. The heights of beauty achieved in literature and computer generated movies of ultra-advanced civilizations are, like autonomous androids, within the outer reaches of our ability to understand and create. Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired physicists, NASA engineers, and regular old armchair theorists alike to explore the depths of our shared imagination to datamine the impossible. 

Even projects as "old" as the Mir and Skylab space stations acted as the original intellectual stepping stones for the current-day International Space Station. There is as much difference between these early space habitats and the ISS as there is between Beijing 30 years ago and Beijing today.

So even if you find yourself getting bored watching a single robot prepare to pick up a drill for five minutes before moving one actuator, there are many reasons to hope. There is hope, at least, for continuous transformation and paradigm change. How well we do this, as a global and solar system-wide society, is likely to reflect each one of us, as a whole, unstintingly.


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