How KAIST Won Robot Competition

It looks like this is a pretty impressive robot that KAIST won this recent competition with:

On Saturday, Team KAIST from South Korea emerged as the winner of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in Pomona, Calif., after its robot, an adaptable humanoid called DRC-HUBO, beat out 22 other robots from five different countries, winning the US $2 million grand prize. The robot’s “transformer” ability to switch back and forth from a walking biped to a wheeled machine proved key to its victory. Many robots lost their balance and collapsed to the ground while trying to perform tasks such as opening a door or operating a drill. Not DRC-HUBO. Its unique design allowed it to perform tasks faster and, perhaps more important, stay on its feet—and wheels.

“Bipedal walking [for robots] is not very stable yet,” Jun Ho Oh, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology who led the KAIST Team, told IEEE Spectrum. “One single thing goes wrong, the result is catastrophic.” He said a robot with a humanoid form has advantages when operating in a human environment, but he wanted to find a design that could minimize the risk of falls. “I thought about different things, and the simplest was wheels on the knees.”

DARPA decided to organize the DRC after the Fukushima accident in Japan, hoping to advance the field of disaster robotics. The DRC Finals called for teams of semi-autonomous robots and human operators to work together in a simulated disaster environment. The robots created by universities and companies for the competition varied widely in size and shape and include legged robots, wheeled robots, and hybrids as well.  [IEEE.org]

You can read more at the link, but basically KAIST won the competition because this robot completed all the tasks that the organizers outlined for this competition.