Robotics competition generated groundbreaking research
Last weekend was the final round of competition in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s contest to design control systems for a humanoid robot that could climb a ladder, remove debris, drive a utility vehicle, and perform several other tasks related to a hypothetical disaster. The team representing MIT finished sixth out of a field of 25. But before the competition, the team’s leader, Russ Tedrake, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, said, “I feel as if we’ve already won, because of all the amazing research our students did” — including a paper that won the overall best-paper award at the 2014 International Conference on Humanoid Robots. Optima primed In control theory, control of a dynamic system — such as a robot, an airplane, or a power grid — is often treated as an optimization problem. The trick is to contrive a mathematical function whose minimum value represents a desired...