After watching the robots move ultra-slowly during the Trials, I'm very happy that they are putting more time constraints on the tasks. Force the robots to be m

After watching the robots move ultra-slowly during the Trials, I'm very happy that they are putting more time constraints on the tasks. Force the robots to be more autonomous, e.g., giving them the instruction "open the door" instead of the low-level instructions given currently, is another big change. Unfortunately, based on a conversation with one of the team-leaders, it doesn't seem like the robots are set up to handle high-level instructions, and they don't even have the perception algorithms needed to enable this kind of autonomy (e.g., no object recognition to recognize the door, and more generally no machine learning/computer vision). The teams will have a lot of work to do in the next year, but these new constraints are really needed if humanoid robots are going to do useful work.