Accomplishing DARPA's robot challenge (pt 1) using Human Level Artificial Intelligence

Note:  To make this website free to the public please click on an ad to support my sponsors or you can make a tax-deductable donation using Paypal (click on the donation icon on the left).

DARPA, a defense agency of the US government has announced the Robot Challenge 2012 and the first contest will be held on Dec. of 2013. Their mission is to give money to Universities and technology companies to build them a robot that can do "mundane human tasks". According to the government, the reason for the the contest was to build robots that can do search and rescue missions. They wanted to build robots that can go into dangerous zones to do tasks. The Japan earthquake was one example.

There were several tasks (about 8 tasks) the human robot has to accomplish in the robot challenge. 1. walk around dangerous terrains. 2 open a locked door. 3. identify a broken pipe. 4. climb a ladder. 5. use tools, like a sledge hammer. 6. fix a broken pipe. 7. control vehicles with simple functions. 8. push buttons.

In the video, a robot was given a mission to turn off a nuclear reactor and to fix broken pipes. The robot has to remember and do the steps that was given by a boss. There are some steps not given to the robot, such as how to fix a broken pipe. That is knowledge the robot should know on its own. There are no sound in the video because I wanted to show the viewers what the robot is thinking while accomplishing a mission. The flashing text and freeze frames are the internal thoughts of the robot and not instruction text for the viewers. These internal thoughts describe the details of how the robot produce intelligence.

This robot accomplishes the mission based on linear instructions given by his boss. During the mission, the robot has to use his own logic to solve problems. For example, in the video, the robot identifies 2 leaks on a pipe. Instead of patching up 2 leaks individually, he decided to patch up 2 leaks with one replacement pipe. Also, another important note is that the robot needs common sense in order to fully understand the mission and what he really needs to do. If he runs into problems, he has to find ways to solve these interrupted problems. For example, if the robot was given instructions to turn a key switch off, but he can't find the key, he must use common sense to solve the problem. Maybe the key is on the floor or there is an alternative way of turning of the gas flow without the key. The robot must use common sense to analyze the environment, generate ideas, solve problems, and do tasks.

DARPA's Robot Challenge is an attempt by the United States to build a humanoid robot. Basically, they are trying to build a robot that can think, act, and behave like a 5-year old child. Opening a locked door is a very difficult problem to solve in current AI (2013). If the door was locked and the robot didn't have the key, then how can the robot enter the house?? Human beings solve the problem by using common sense. They can use logic to come up with alternative methods to get into the house. For example, breaking the window and entering the house is one option. However, humans know that this method is not desirable because the owner has to pay for the window repairs. They can also find a spare key, which is usually hidden in a secret location. Or they can find someone that has the same key. These options are analyzed and a decision is made on what actions to take to open a locked door. This locked door problem has been an unsolvable problem for AI researchers since 1950.

By the way, my robot doesn't use: planning programs/heuristic searches (used by MIT and Stanford University), Bayesian's probability theories for decision making, Bayesian's equation for induction and deduction, semantic networks for natural language understanding, predicate calculus, common sense systems, first-order logic, rule-based systems, genetic programming, or MACHINE LEARNING. All knowledge in the robot's brain comes from knowledge taught in school or from books.