A Compilation of Robots Falling Down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge

What Hacker News said

Recommends FabHK · 2018-01 · on “Sussman anomaly”

Moravec's paradox - stuff we thought is hard (chess, derivatives) is easy, while stuff we think is easy (face recognition, getting out of a car, opening a door) is really hard. [LINK] One of my favourite videos is this compilation of robots falling (failing) during the simplest tasks at the 2015 DARPA challenge: [this video]

Cites Vorcin83 · 2015-06 · on “Korea’s Team KAIST Wins the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge”

This [1] list of failures shows that some robots seem to "just" have hardcoded motions, for example for turning the valve. [1] [this video]

Cites felippee · 2017-01 · on “Toyota's Gill Pratt on Self-Driving Cars and the Reality of Full Autonomy”

Yup, there is a boatload of low level knowledge missing from any AI that we build. It is painfully visible with robots (and autonomous cars are robots as well), see DARPA challenge video which was then lead BTW by Gill Pratt: [this video] A lot of stuff we take for granted such a supporting oneself by a nearby wall when loosing balance, is completely out of reach of todays "AI".

Cites FabHK · 2017-09 · on “Real-Time Recognition of Handwritten Chinese Characters”

slightly off-topic, but the images in the article illustrate it beautifully: I think many people don't realise (I didn't) what an amazing skill it is to be able to read handwriting (cursive). I took it for granted to be able to read hand-written German, English, Spanish, and totally forgot that it must have taken me some time as a kid to acquire that skill (beyond reading and writing generally). However, when I studied Chinese for a bit, the (printed) characters are tricky to start with, but reading a fluent writer's handwriting ("unconstrained", as they call it in the article) is nigh impossible. I think stroke order is hugely important, in that it forms the conventions for fast abbreviated

Cites Judgmentality · 2021-01 · on “2 times 3 can sometimes equal 7 with Android's Neural Network API”

> I'd trust a machine to drive more accurately than most people I see on the highway. Humans aren't special, in fact more often than not we're sloppy, subject to fatigue, and a whole bunch of other negative things. Humans are much, much, much more capable than the absolute state-of-the-art robots when it comes to doing things in an uncontrolled environment. [this video]

Cites FabHK · 2022-04 · on “The singularity is close?”

That reminds me of Moravec's paradox: What we thought was hard and difficult (and indicative of intelligence), such as playing Chess and computing derivatives, is actually quite easy, while a lot of things that we consider trivially easy (distinguish a dog from a cat, pick up an egg, read some squiggly text) are quite hard. [LINK] One of my favourite demonstration of that was the 2015 DARPA robot challenge, where one robot after the other failed at such difficult tasks as walking and opening a door. [this video]

Cites FabHK · 2024-04 · on “An electric new era for Atlas”

We've come a long way from the 2015 DARPA Challenge, where the robots succeeded only in falling down: [this video] [LINK]

Cites FabHK · 2024-04 · on “An electric new era for Atlas”

The progress since the 2015 DARPA challenge (where robots succeeded mostly in falling down) is impressive. Less than a decade! [this video] [LINK]