The winner, to be announced Saturday, will take home $2 million. The runner-up will get $1 million and $500,000 will go to the team in third place.
Each robot competed in an obstacle course of driving, opening a door, opening a valve, punching through a wall and dealing with rubble and stairs.
The challenges were designed specifically with the Fukushima disaster in mind.
After the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, a team of plant workers attempted to enter the darkened reactor buildings to manually vent accumulated hydrogen, only to be forced to turn back due to radiation.
In the days that followed, hydrogen built up, fueling explosions that extensively damaged the facility, contaminating the environment.
Experts said that if the Japanese had had advanced robotics systems that could have used tools people use in everyday life they might have avoided much of the damage caused by the hydrogen explosions.
However, the technology displayed in Pomona actually proved less than impressive as it took the participating robots minutes to open a door and many were unable to get out of a car.
“There is a long way to go,” admitted DAPRA official Brad Tousley. “There’s fact and there’s fiction. There’s a lot of fiction out there that robots are much more capable than they really are…”
