Last December, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the trials of its first ever Robotics Challenge at the Homestead Speedway in Miami, FL. DARPA announced the competition in October 2012 in response to the Fukushima, Japan Dachai nuclear accident on March 11, 2011.
There, robots were ill-equipped to assess the disaster, inspect the facility and fix problems. The purpose of the challenge is to develop semi-autonomous ground robots that can do complex tasks in dangerous and degraded human-engineered environments.