Is Rosie the Robot Maid from the Jetsons here yet? Several different types of humanoid are currently deployed commercially or in trials. We've come along way since the DARPA Robotics Challenge of 2015/2016, where the most popular footage was the blooper reels of robots falling over and failing to open doors or climb stairs. The Avatar XPrize of 2019-2022 showcased some extremely sophisticated humanoids that certainly advanced the state of the art but the holy grail of humanoid robots is combining incredible sophistication into a sub $50,000 package. Wouldn't some companies pay a lot more?

March 22nd, 2012 is the day it all began. That's the day we officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the origin of what we now call Open Robotics. The prospect of starting a company is both scary and exciting; but starting an open-source company in a niche as specialized as robotics, now that is terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and some very smart friends, a whole lot of them. We also had the wind at our backs.

One of the things that we learned from the DARPA Robotics Challenge is that it's useful for robots to have legs to walk, but it's even more useful for robots to be versatile and adaptable, with multimodal locomotion capabilities that they can deploy depending on the situation. At the DRC, we saw all kinds of different designs, but one of the more unique approaches came from the University of Bonn, in Germany, with their robot Momaro. Momaro used a "centaur" design, with four legs that had wheels on the bottom (like a wheeled quadruped) coupled to a humanoid upper torso with a head and arms. It was the top-ranked European robot in the DRC, completing an almost perfect run in just 34 minutes. We've since been wondering whether the centaur design would inspire other disaster robots, and now we know the answer is yes.

I can't sit here and guarantee you a robot won't take your job one day--capitalism kind of has a thing for automation. What I can tell you is that in the near future, robots will be doing jobs that no one wants to do. Which is why for its next robotics competition, Darpa is going underground, with the Darpa Subterranean Challenge. If you don't remember, that's the same far-out federal research agency that put on the Grand Challenge (which helped kick off the self-driving car revolution), and the Robotics Challenge (which helped get humanoids walking among us). And now it's calling on researchers to autonomously explore the innards of Earth.

You could argue that the door handle has had a disproportionate influence on modern robotics. It was the humanoids of the Darpa Robotics Challenge, after all, that were tasked with opening doors, and it was those machines that helped drive robots to where they are now. Today Boston Dynamics posted a video of its SpotMini quadruped robot extending an arm out of its head to turn a handle. With the dexterity of a tray-carrying butler, it uses its foot to prop the door ajar, then elbows it all the way open for its (armless) SpotMini friend to walk through. But it's also an interesting twist in the quest to make robots that get along with a world built by and for humans. Maybe the Darpa Robotics Challenge had it wrong with humanoids after all, and the best robots for rescue operations will look nothing like humans--or any other animal, for that matter.

Two years ago at IROS 2015 in Germany, Honda R&D presented a paper on an experimental new humanoid robot designed for disaster response. This wasn't entirely surprising, since we'd guessed that Honda had started working on a humanoid designed to be more robust, and practical, than Asimo after the Fukushima disaster. But as with most large Japanese companies, Honda does an excellent job of (almost) never communicating about the projects that it has under development. Pretty much the only sneak peeks we ever get come from research papers, and last week at IROS 2017 in Vancouver, we got the biggest look inside Honda's humanoid robotics research and development program that we've had in years. In a paper entitled "Development of Experimental Legged Robot for Inspection and Disaster Response in Plants," roboticists from Honda R&D showed off the latest prototype of their disaster relief robot, the E2-DR.

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If you're ever feeling down, do yourself a favor and watch some footage from the 2015 Darpa Robotics Challenge. This competition of bipedal beasts put robots up against a number of challenges, from turning valves to driving a car. But they struggled to open doors, much less stand for a decent amount of time. Our face-planting future robotic overlords could stand some improvements. Oh, how the world laughed. And oh, how the world gasped when Boston Dynamics dropped a video of its newest bot, Handle, this week.

When some of the world's most advanced rescue robots are foiled by nothing more complex than a doorknob, you get a good sense of the challenge of making our homes and workplaces more automated. At the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest held over the weekend in California, two dozen extremely sophisticated robots did their best to perform a series of tasks on an outdoor course, including turning a valve, climbing some steps, and opening a door (see "A Transformer Wins DARPA's $2 Million Robotics Challenge"). Although a couple of robots managed to complete the course, others grasped thin air, walked into walls, or simply toppled over as if overcome with the sheer impossibility of it all. At the same time, efforts by human controllers to help the robots through their tasks may offer clues as to how human-machine collaboration could be deployed in various other settings. "I think this is an opportunity for everybody to see how hard robotics really is," says Mark Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, now owned by Google, which produced an extremely sophisticated humanoid robot called Atlas (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agile Robots").

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Do you find yourself worried by the implications of Humans, Channel 4's new drama about the exploits of near-human intelligent robots? Have you ever fretted over the apocalyptic warnings of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the threat of superintelligent artificial intelligence? Have your children ever lay wide-eyed thinking aboutrobot drone armies, such as those in Marvel's film Avengers: Age of Ultron? If you find this creepy or have answered "yes" to any of these questions, you should immediately watch footage from the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge.