NASA Valkyrie flubs her first battle

The guys at Johnson entered their Valkyrie robot into the DARPA Robotics Challenge and she got zero points.

Despite this poor performance, I love the Valkyrie, basically because the designers purposely included “must look cool” in their objectives. I’m sure she’ll do better in the future.

The other NASA robot competing (JPL’s Robosimian) did much better, coming in fifth and looking reasonably cool. The winner was the boring looking Japanese SCHAFT S-1, recently purchased by Google as part of their huge push into robotics.