BBC News about DARPA robot competition

The article from the BBC America news feed gives the overall results and includes a silent video of robots in action, nice pictures of some of the contenders and "barely rans" (the ones that scored zero points) as well as this DARPA YouTube Channel that has full length video recorded live during the competition (more than 20 hours total).

Interesting that a robot built by the Johnson Space Center was among those that scored zero points, but JPL did OK (finishing fifth) behind a Japanese company recently purchased by Google, a team called IHMC Robotics that used a robot built by a company called Boston Dynamics, a team from Carnegie Mellon University (third), and MIT (fourth).

"Significance" in data analysis

A friend recently brought this article to my attention. Altough it is specifically about the massive confusion in the general public about the distinction between a theory (very highly reliable, like the Theory of Special and General Relativity) and a law (only useful under special conditions, like the Ideal Gas Law), it makes a great point about data analysis in item 4.

Read it here.

Although crude, this diagram explaining the 'normal' distribution gives a nice picture of the basic criteria we use when interpreting data in the first-year physics lab, specifically the conclusing that a difference of more than two standard deviations indicates a disagreement between two measurements or between theory and experiment.

IEEE Spectrum article on DARPA Robotics Challenge

Here is what some mechanical engineering students (mostly grad students) and professionals are up to lately. This IEEE Spectrum news article from Saturday gives the final results of the two-day competition but lacks much detail. The link in the first sentence takes you back to the Friday competition and shows pictures of some of the robots in action.

There should be more updates from them over the next few days.

I stumbled across an article about the Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) Tartan Rescue "CHIMP" project a few weeks ago. It uses a non-human model for the robot, as does a JPL team.

A non-human model is starting to attract attention for specialized tasks where there is no reason to have the robot look semi-human. For example, there is a research group at Florida State pursuing the cockroach as a model for a small robot that can climb a vertical wall while carrying a camera to assist military or police teams planning to enter a potentially hostile area.