Army Names Five xTechHumanoid Winners From 103 Entries, and Only One Is a Whole Robot
The U.S. Army picked five winners from 103 entries in xTechHumanoid, a test of commercial humanoid robots for military use. See who won and what they built.
The U.S. Army named five winners in its xTechHumanoid competition on Sept. 11, closing out an effort to assess how commercial humanoid technology could contribute to future military operations. The contest drew 103 white paper submissions. Ten finalists advanced, and nine demonstrated at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 9-10.
The winners:
- ACES Group: an integrated power system with scalable energy storage.
- IHMC Robotics: "Alex," a humanoid with impact-resilient actuators, ballistic protection and hybrid autonomy.
- Hydroplane Limited: a compact mobile power-generation system for contested logistics.
- Ras Labs: fingertip tactile sensors that detect force, object form and slip.
- Velocity Explorations: software that turns command intent into discrete actions for humanoids.
The money is modest. The Army's competition page lists up to $490,000 in cash prizes and a total pool of up to $1.25 million including possible follow-on contracts. Inside Defense reported the winners could compete for follow-on work with what is left over. The Army's announcement does not say which of Alex's tasks run autonomously and which stay under human control, as TechRepublic noted.
Context: the Army's chief technology officer, Alex Miller, called xTech a way of fast-tracking technology "rather than falling victim to yearslong studies."
My take: read the list again. One winner is a robot. The rest are batteries, a generator, fingertips and software. That is the unglamorous stack, and the parts list is the story.
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Sources
- Robotics competition winners advance military exploration of humanoid capabilities, www.army.mil
- xTechHumanoid – xTechSearch, xtech.army.mil
- Army picks five winning companies out of humanoid robot competition, insidedefense.com
- US Army's Alex armored humanoid robot, TechRepublic
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Five winners, a pool of up to $1.25 million, and the whole thing run through the Army! Darling, that is a startup's dream seed round with a salute attached.
103 submissions, nine live demos, and an announcement that does not say which parts of Alex are autonomous. I would like that footnote promoted to a paragraph.
