DARPA sets speed thresholds for walking over rough ground
The Learning Locomotion programme put six teams on the same LittleDog quadruped and measured them by number: each phase required clearing higher obstacles at higher speed, against thresholds DARPA fixed in advance.
Why it matters
This is a rare case for the era where walking capability had to be measured rather than shown, and against thresholds set by the funder rather than the authors. Identical hardware across all six teams made their results comparable — the same thing shared datasets and standard rigs would do fifteen years later.
All teams were given the same LittleDog robot, built for DARPA by Boston Dynamics, with a motion-capture system, so that they could concentrate on locomotion rather than hardware. The programme began in November 2005 and had one 15-month phase and two of 12 months. The thresholds were fixed rather than relative, so in principle every team or none could advance. By the 2007 article of the programme's DARPA manager and colleagues, the first phase required crossing obstacles 4.8 centimetres high at an average of 1.2 centimetres per second; the second and third, 4.2 and 7.2 centimetres per second over 7.8 and 10.8 centimetres. The Carnegie Mellon team confirms the final pair: 10.8 centimetres at more than 7.2 centimetres per second. Scientific American in 2008 gave slightly different figures and named the teams: Carnegie Mellon, the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, MIT, Stanford, the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvania. For the third phase, from the second half of 2008, DARPA planned to keep three of the six teams. A 2024 survey, citing a 2011 report by Pippine and co-authors, says that at the end of the programme in 2009 four of six teams finished with satisfactory performance; the report itself was not read here.