''DARPA’s role is to spur innovation. And we do it by focused, short term efforts. We pick things that are not impossible, but also not very low risk. So we take very high risk gambles, and those risks have tremendous payoffs. So if we’re successful it means that these robots are actually going to be able to make a difference. In particular, in disaster scenarios making society more resilient. The lesson of the original challenge (Grand Challenge - driverless cars ) is that persistence pays. It’s important if you know the technology is almost there and you can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel, a little bit of persistence will pay off. What I’m hoping for in the trials is that some of the teams will score some points. I don’t think that any team is going to score all the points that there are. Maybe no teams will even score half the points that there are. But I think some teams will do moderately well. My expectation is that the robots are going to be slow. What we’re looking for right now is for the teams to just do as well as roughly that one year old child. If we can get there, then we think that we have good reason to believe that some of these teams with continued persistence for another year will actually be able to demonstrate robots that show the utility that these things might have in a real disaster scenario. DARPA is in the innovation business, not in the development business. So, what we do is we wait for technology to be almost ready for something big to happen, and then we add a focused effort to catalyze the something. It doesn’t mean that we take it all the way into a system that’s deployed or to the marketplace. We rely on the commercial sector to do that. But we provide the impetus, the extra push the technology needs to do that.''