Today was the vehicle fit evaluation and Photo Day at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge. More about that below.
First things first: I misidentified the countries three of the competitors are from yesterday: both Team Robots and Team Kaist are from South Korea, and Team AERO is from Japan.
As I thought, the "camera free zone" in the Garage is history. There are hundreds of the top robotics experts in the world here and they're all as excited and giddy about being here as a pack of cub scouts in a candy factory.
That said, I had a pretty busy day and was unable to get shots of all the competitors. The protocol is that you ask if it's ok. But no one is saying "no" because they all want to take pictures (or videos) of your robot too.
Here are the photos I was able to take:
http://images.dailykos.com/...
ATLAS Support (Boston Dynamics, USA) Again, not competing, but their Atlas robots are in competition used by other teams. They actually had a post-it note out front that said "Photos OK". The Atlas shown here typical of those in competition.
http://images.dailykos.com/...
Team KAIST (Korea)
Sorry for the poor image quality.
http://images.dailykos.com/...
Team AERO (Japan)
http://images.dailykos.com/...
Team GRIT (USA)
Not a serious competitor, but you have to give them credit for getting a robot built on a shoestring budget.
http://images.dailykos.com/...
Team Walkman (Italy)
We were right next to the area where the vehicle fit evaluation was taking place. One of the competitive events is that the robot is supposed to drive an SUV through a course and then get out by itself. It does not have to get itself into the vehicle. What was happening today was that the robots were fit into the vehicles to make sure there wouldn't be any problems with that during the competition.
Here's a picture of team Walk-Man during one of these checks:
http://images.dailykos.com/...
I mentioned the debris pile; here a shot of one in one of the spaces in the Garage:
Once again, I hope you've found this a worthwhile read.
-Dave