Many observers had similar doubts back in the 1920s, when a wealthy hotelier put up a $25,000 prize for the first aviator to cross the Atlantic. An obscure pilot named Charles Lindbergh accomplished the feat, and the age of commercial aviation was born. For centuries, contests and prizes have unleashed the competitive instincts of scientists and helped advance technology. Robotics is no different. Since the early ’70s, competitions at high schools, universities and in underground art communities have helped to train the roboticists currently building today’s automated servants. Col. Jose Negron of the military’s research arm, DARPA, which is organizing the Grand Challenge, says the contest will harness the talents of the tinkerers to help the military in its drive toward capable robots. “I can get the Boeings of the world to help us any time I want. I’m after the kid in his house or the guy in his garage who’s building software.”
The first formal robot competition took place 32 years ago in the hallways of MIT as part of a mechanical-engineering class called 2.70. Students were given a hodgepodge of random parts: a small DC motor from a Polaroid camera, rubber bands, a few pieces of pine board, and told to build a remote-controlled robot that could perform a task, such as moving ping-pong balls into a trough. At first, recalls George Lechter, now a high-tech entrepreneur living in Miami, students resented being sent from the classroom into the grimy machine shops. They were eventually won over by the challenge, and the large crowds that gathered to watch the bizarre machines battle it out. Lechter won the contest in 1973 with “O Angelica,” a robot he named after a whorehouse in Cali, Colombia, that occupied a special place in his youthful imagination.
From there, robot competitions proliferated. In 1989, inspired by 2.70, Segway inventor Dean Kamen started FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a robotics competition for high schoolers and their mentors. This month more than 20,000 students will participate in the event, with the winners gathering at Houston’s Reliant Stadium in April for the finals. Teams are also competing this spring around the world in the regional contests of the fifth annual RoboCup, a robotic soccer tournament. The goal of the Japanese organizers is to have a team of humanoid robots capable of defeating the human champions by 2050.
But most organizers consider these competitions a success merely if they inspire students and hobbyists, and create a roiling ecosystem of innovation that might someday lead to real, practical robots. That’s why military officials don’t mind if the robots do indeed crash into each other and expire right out of the gate of the first annual Grand Challenge. They will simply repeat the event until someone cracks the code. When one day the robots reach Las Vegas, check into a hotel and play poker against each other, now, that will be a really cool robot competition.
