May 14 – Walkman is ready to take California: from Genoa to Los Angeles, a team of the Italian Institute of Technology brings a robot (Walkman) to first edition of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), the international competition between robotic experts launched in September 2012 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense. The goal is to define robot technological standards to be used in situations of natural or manmade disasters. The competition – held in Pomona, near Los Angeles, on June 5-6 – will feature 25 teams from the USA, Japan, South Korea, Europe, Hong Kong, and China. Robots include:m Walkman, the NASA robot Jet PropulsionLabs and one developed by Boston Dynamics with DARPA that will be used by seven teams, including the MIT. The prize is $3.5 million that will be awarded to the top three teams. Walkman was designed and implemented by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, in collaboration with the Research Centre “E. Piaggio” of the University of Pisa, in a project funded by the European Commission since the end of 2013. The Italian team is the only one from Europe participating in the competition, by direct invitation of DARPA. “For the strength of the team and its ideas, I believe their participation in the DRC will increase the quality of the competition as a whole,” wrote Gill Pratt, director of the DRC program in the invitation letter addressed to researcher Nikolaos Tsagarakis, who will lead the team during the competition. “We are very proud to participate in the DRC with a project built entirely in Italy and that represents Europe – comments Roberto Cingolani, Scientific Director of the IIT – Many countries around the world invest in robotic technologies, because of their application value: from home automation to industrial and biomedical implications. Walkman is proof that Europe, and above all Italy, plays a decisive role in the development of the sector, in particular in setting technology standards in one of the main technology fields of the future.” (Red)
Walkman: the Italian robot goes to California
