NASA developed an advanced robot known as Valkyrie that competed in DARPA’s 2013 Robotics Challenge Trial. DARPA hosted the robot challenge at the Florida’s Homestead Miami Speedway this past December. Eight teams were selected to participate in a series of trials that were focused on displaying whether each team’s robot could react to common disaster response situations. Sadly, NASA’s Valkyrie performed poorly compared to its peers, being blown out of the water by the Japanese designed robot SCHAFT. The end goal of DARPA is to promote the advancement of robotics technology and lead interested companies to produce functional automatons that can serve the public good. While this goal is worthy of praise, is this new frontier of technology not also rifled with potential vulnerabilities? Not to wear out my Terminator references, but its seems like Skynet is a definite possibility…

– by Ben Volcsko, Research Assistant