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# South Korea Wins DARPA Competition, Paves Way For Robots In Disaster Areas

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/xcQbdLsH.m3u8" -->
## Video: South Korea Wins DARPA Competition, Paves Way For Robots In Disaster Areas

[Watch (HLS stream): South Korea Wins DARPA Competition, Paves Way For Robots In Disaster Areas](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/xcQbdLsH.m3u8) (1:28)

![South Korea Wins DARPA Competition, Paves Way For Robots In Disaster Areas](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/xcQbdLsH/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2015-06-07. DARPA intends to use advances in human-style robotics, like those seen in this competition, to develop better disaster-response robots._


---

Jul 27, 2023 6:23 PM UTC

---

## More From This Series

[All Videos](https://time.com/video/)

[Meet The Google Robot That Won DARPA's Robotics Challenge Trials](/video/Ka0o62TT/)

### Meet The Google Robot That Won DARPA's Robotics Challenge Trials

[South Korea Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot](/video/azyFN6N1/)

### South Korea Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot

[Robotic Cockroaches to Help Save Lives in Disasters](/video/Pkyw8xrp/)

### Robotic Cockroaches to Help Save Lives in Disasters

---


## Transcript

Seeing Kaist from South Korea as one of the 2015 darker robotics challenge. It's robot Hubo vested 22 other robots with it's 44 minutes 28 seconds time to take home the 2 million dollar top prize. Each robotic competitor got a one hour window to drive a car, open doors, pull levers, turn knobs, and saw holes in walls, mostly autonomously and completely untethered. This parade of robotic dexterity got is start following the Fukushima Nuclear disaster in 2011. DARPA's competition paired international teams against one another in an effort to put robotic development on the fast track. The ultimate goal is to create robots that can enter areas too dangerous for humans to do important jobs.

Because for all their ungainly appearances and occasional balance issues, robots do much better with hard radiation than humans. Number one concern is human life. I mean this type of technology in any operations in humanitarian assistance disaster response is to save lives. The robots are designed to bare at least some resemblance to humans because they'll be doing tasks normally people would. Engineer Darwin Caldwell explains, the environment you're going into is a human environment, and a humanoid robot is designed to take on a human environment. With the payout of finalist prizes, Darpa is done with the contest, but the agency intends to apply the technologies and strategies the teams developed to future robotics projects

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