Congrats to IHMC Robotics for winning Bronze in my Humanoid Olympics: Doors Event

Round Knob Push Door with a time of 18 Seconds

We have our first winner of “Benjie’s Humanoid Olympic Games” my set of manipulation challenges designed to measure progress of the state of the art.

On the podium of champions. And yes, that is a custom medal. Did you know you can just have those shipped from Amazon?

IHMC Robotics, submitted a winning entry on the ‘round push door’ competition with their robot Nadia, with a time of 18 seconds.¹

Congrats to the authors, Duncan Calvert, Luigi Penco, Dexton Anderson, Tomasz Bialek , Arghya Chatterjee, Bhavyansh Mishra, Geoffrey Clark, Sylvain Bertrand, Robert Griffin on the medal and for having their paper published. (Today!)

Thanks to Duncan Calvert for reaching out and Congrats to the whole team!

Shameless Self Promotion

If you want to keep up with future winners you should…

Almost gold

The team also submitted a bid for gold (self-closing pull door), in the same video (below, upper left corner):

Ultimately our team of judges² decided that the self-closing of the door was slow enough that the robot did not have to hold it open nor move especially fast to get through before the door closed on them, which was not in the spirit of the challenge. I hear they are undaunted, though and working on a further submission, so if you are a roboticist, the race is on!

1. That means the future winners of the Bronze category will have to be faster than 13 seconds (25% faster).

2. Me, invoking my right to be capricious and arbitrary