In the future, when an earthquake or tsunami strikes a populated area or a terrorist attack decimates a city, teams of disaster experts partnered with robots -- whose skills are being honed in rigorous competitions funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- may be the first responders.

Having people and robots work together in teams is essential to robot success in disaster response, Gill Pratt, DARPA Robotics Challenge program manager, told American Forces Press Service recently, saying that DARPA expects the field of robotics to undergo a historic transformation that could drive innovation in robots for defense, health care, agriculture and industry.

"For the foreseeable future, our robots are not going to have anywhere near the intelligence they require to do even small parts of missions on their own," Pratt said. "They're going to require a human being to figure out what the plan is, to figure out what the contingencies are and to understand the situation."

What robots can do, Pratt said, is contribute sensing and physical effects at a distance from a human controller, operating in a dangerous environment while a human operator stays back where it's safe and directs the action.

"Together, working as a team," he added, "they can be more effective than either one of them working by themselves."

Launched in October 2012, the DARPA Robotics Challenge has held two of three competitions last year -- a virtual event in June and a live two-day event in December.

The first competition tested software teams' ability to guide a simulated robot through three sample tasks in a virtual environment. In December, teams had to guide their robots through as many as eight individual physical tasks that tested robot mobility, manipulation, dexterity, perception and operator-control mechanisms.

During the finals, to be held sometime in the next 12-18 months, human-robot teams will attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks with degraded communications between the robots and their operators.

Even with progress made in the DARPA Robotics Challenge and elsewhere in the industry, Pratt said, "We don't know how to make robots intelligent enough to do sophisticated tasks, but we do know how to make them do very specific subtasks."

These days in a laboratory, he said, a robot can be told to open a door and the robot will use its visual sensors to locate the door, compare that image against a library of different handles it's been programmed to recognize, turn the door handle and pull the door open.

Pratt said DARPA expects roughly a dozen teams to participate in the finals, including the top eight teams from the December trials that are in contract negotiations with DARPA to receive 1 million US dollars for development this year.