Reflection of the videos on 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge

From Wikipedia, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) is a prize competition funded by the US
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Held from 2012 to 2015, it aims to develop semiautonomous ground robots that can do "complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered
environments."
Out of the three videos from the DRC, two videos show how the winners and the runners-up of the
DRC 2015 finals achieved the top two spots and the third video shows some failures of the
participating robots.
The first video is about the DRC winner bot Hubo by the Korean team Kaist. The robot successfully
managed to clear 8/8 tasks which are required to be completed by the participating robots in a
record time of 44 minutes and 28 seconds. In the 10x sped video, we can see Hubo, the biped bot,
doing tasks like driving a car, getting out of it, opening a door, turning a valve, cutting a hole in the
wall, pulling and plugging in sockets, walking over obstacles, and climbing the stairs.
The second video is a documentary-like video around the 24 team, runner-up team called ihmc.
ihmc also completed 8/8 tasks but at 50 minutes 26 seconds, which is a few minutes more than the
first ranked Team Kaist from Korea. The video shows a preview of the user interface of the
mission control if you will, where a person can control the robot remotely through the video feed
perceptors. The robots keeps getting these messages at the rate of 200 messages per second. The
video gives a peek into what happens behind the scenes when a robot is being maneuvered.
The third and the final video is a compilation of video clips of robots falling down in the DRC.
Most of these videos have biped, humanoid robots that are struggling to stay on their feet. Most of
the collapses happen when the robot cannot balance itself on one of its legs, very evidently, because
of the improper distribution of the mass over the body of the robot causing it to tip over and fall (A
lot of these falls are backwards due to the massive payload on the back of the humanoid robots).
These videos show how difficult it is to build general purpose robots (as opposed to specialized
robots like bomb disposal robots), and how the expectation of people from science fiction is nothing
like the reality. The silver lining is the observation that the robots in DRC are getting faster and
more autonomous than previous iterations of the DRC.