Lockheed Martin's Todd Danko on the DRC Finals and the future of robotics

One of the 24 teams competing at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, and the only team fielded by a large private company, was Lockheed Martin's Team Trooper and its robot Leo. To find out more about what goes into programming a humanoid robot and the future of robotics, we talked to the team leader, Todd Danko.
We think that investing in mobile manipulation, which is effectively what we're doing, will be very useful in future applications like underwater or space robotics; places where it's very difficult or impossible to get people to do those tasks. You can use our systems to tell robots what to do, and let the robots do those things.

We're in a world that's complementary to the humanoid form. If you have a very constrained task, like in a factory, a humanoid isn't the right answer. You want to optimize your robot to solve those problems. If you don't have a single problem to optimize, and you want a more general robot, then a humanoid robot makes more sense.
It produces tremendous challenges. For a humanoid robot just to stay still and not fall over if you touch it. That's a lot of software on its own. You have to have a good dynamic model of the robot and run it constantly at a thousand Hertz, so it's harder for the robot to fall over. Meanwhile, a robot with wheels, if you turn everything off, it will be mechanically stable. It just sits there. 





Generally, one thing that surprised me is the state of the art of robotics and especially humanoid robotics. It's one thing to see them in a movie or some real robots in specific demos, but with those demos you're seeing the best of what could be, so the state of the art is actually a lot more primitive than many people think it is. It's exciting to be able to help grow that.

 

It's going to be a long time before we see a robot like this. Look at what [happened in the competition] and how many people it took to keep that robot from destroying itself. There's a lot of work that needs to be done before we're contributing in a way that's not a burden to the operators.

 (C)jonahnsubuga