The caveat, of course, is that the Virtual Robotics Challenge happened entirely within a simulation program. It was an audition, essentially, for the first physical trial this December, where the seven winning teams and their lineup of identical Atlas bots will join a more diverse menagerie of team-built robots. The highest-scorers among that group will compete in the final showdown, yet another multi-task obstacle course scheduled for December 2014, with a top prize of $2 million.

The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), the most ambitious robot competition in history, cleared a key milestone yesterday. The Pentagon’s research wing announced the results of the Virtual Robotics Challenge, a five-day-long qualification event during which 26 teams from around the world directed a humanoid robot to complete astonishingly difficult tasks, with little to no human intervention, including picking up, attaching, and turning on a fire hose. Seven teams advanced, earning funding and the use of a government-provided robot, the 5-foot-10, 240-pound Boston Dynamics-built Atlas, in the next phase of the DRC.

The caveat, of course, is that the Virtual Robotics Challenge happened entirely within a simulation program. It was an audition, essentially, for the first physical trial this December, where the seven winning teams and their lineup of identical Atlas bots will join a more diverse menagerie of team-built robots. The highest-scorers among that group will compete in the final showdown, yet another multi-task obstacle course scheduled for December 2014, with a top prize of $2 million.

In fact, it’s entirely possible that Gazebo will be the only tangible product of the DRC. DARPA’s first robotic car race, the 2004 Grand Challenge, ended with an autonomous whimper, when none of the self-driven vehicles crossed the finish line in qualifying time. Follow-up Challenges proved more fruitful, but the DRC’s full roster of tasks (which include sawing through a wall with a cordless power tool) could be too difficult even for the world’s best robotics teams. But even in that worst-case scenario, DARPA and the DRC will have created a free, powerful tool, with the potential to unite an entire field.