DARPA plans to offer a $2 million prize to those who can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the DoD’s disaster recovery mission.
DARPA’s Robotics Challenge will launch in October 2012. Teams are sought to compete in challenges involving staged disaster-response scenarios in which robots will have to successfully navigate a series of physical tasks corresponding to anticipated, real-world disaster-response requirements.