4. Building our Behavior Architecture

In this chapter we’ll tell the story of how our behavior system was inspired, designed, and built over roughly a 10-year time period. Ultimately, we’ll reveal the current design as a snapshot in time in the year 2026, as it is still in active development. The story arc of the behavior system spans from roughly 2014 in the run-up to the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) finals  [8], in which our DRC Atlas robot could perform 8 tasks in 1 hour under scrupulous direct teleoperation, to 2026 when our IHMC Alex humanoid robot can perform door traversals and multi-station loco-manipulation sorting tasks automatically in the tens of seconds regime and with high levels of operator neglect.

References cited on this page

[8] DARPA, “DARPA robotics challenge (DRC).” 2026. Available: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/darpa-robotics-challenge