After working for two and a half years, putting in thousands of hours and writing more than a million lines of code, the robotics team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) finished in the top third of competitors in DARPA’s Robotics Challenge.

However, maybe even more important, they not only helped advance the field of humanoid robotics, but some believe their work also made them better researchers and better teachers.

“What will change for me is the next project I’ll take on,” said Taskin Padir, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at WPI. “We have grandiose goals. And the knowledge we gained will be applicable to projects we work on next. When I think about autonomy, there are a lot of building blocks — perception, mobility, manipulation, interaction, interfaces. Now we have resources in each one of those buildings blocks for the next application. It may be disaster response, it may be space exploration.”

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