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 DARPA 4

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Accomplishing DARPA's robot challenge (pt 4) using Human Level Artificial Intelligence

 

     

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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 vechicles with simple functions. 8. push buttons.

In this video, a robot soldier is trying to rescue a hostage, called Paez from a terrorist organization. According to intel, the only bit of information given to the soldier was the location of Paez. No information about how many enemies are guarding the place is given. The team of soldiers work together to take out the enemies and to find and rescue Paez. There are no sound in the video because i wanted to show the viewers what the robot is thinking while working as a soldier. The flashing text and freeze frames are the internal thoughts of the robot and are not instruction text for the viewers.

The first part of the video shows the robot finding and rescuing Paez. The second part shows the team of soldiers getting Paez to the extract point. Their mission is to find Paez and to escort him safely from house2 to the extraction point.

One purpose of this video is to show viewers that the robot has knowledge about team work. The robot knows what other soldiers in the team are supposed to do. When the commander gave the order to create a diamond formation, each member of the team knows exactly what to do.

In Star Trek, the Borg are a bunch of robots that have a collective mind. In human beings, each person thinks and acts, individually. Knowledge of team work and verbal/body language allows us to work in a team. The commander can give an order to stop firing and to move to the extraction point instead. All soldiers in the team will follow orders from the commander. Individual soldiers can disagree or question authority, but the rules of engagement is to follow orders from the commander and that is what each soldier should do.

Another purpose of this video is to show viewers that the robot soldier can do multiple tasks at the same time. In the mission, he had primarily 3 tasks he had to do: 1. protect a hostage 2. kill enemies. 3. navigate to extraction point. All decision making from the robot is based on these 3 tasks. Sometimes the robot has to stop navigating and engage enemies. Other times, the robot has to shoot enemies and navigate. And in other times, the robot has to push the hostage lower and navigate at the same time. Thus, the robot is constantly doing muliple tasks simultaneously during the mission. In addition, the robot has to follow orders from the commander. If the robot commits itself to a decision and the commander gives a brand new order, the robot has to abandon his previous commited decision.

How does the robot learn the skills to be a soldier? The answer is knowledge from school. In particular, knowledge from military school. A programmer doesn't have to use machine learning to teach the robot military skills. The robot doesn't need expert software that coordinates a team. It learns all knowledge from watching lectures, reading books, and participating in bootcamp.

 

 

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