JPL News: RoboSimian Displays Rescue Skills at Robotics Challenge

RoboSimian—an ape-like robot developed by researchers at Caltech, JPL, and UC Santa Barbara—grabbed a fifth-place finish at last weekend's DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals. The 23 teams in the competition were challenged to design a robot that could perform a series of tasks that would be necessary for response during a natural or man-made disaster—tasks such as opening a door, cutting through walls, closing valves, moving debris, and even driving a vehicle.

Although the tasks were performed by the robot's hardware—designed at JPL—the robot was operated by software that included algorithms, or mathematical principles, contributed by Caltech's Joel Burdick, the Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering; current Caltech graduate student Krishna Shankar; and Burdick's former students Jeremy Ma (MS '05, PhD '10), Nick Hudson (MS '05 PhD '09), and Paul Hebert (MS '07, PhD '13) at JPL.

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