A Florida-based U.S. team has taken second place in a robotics competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

The competition, held over the weekend at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, was the second in a series of three competitions hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  A Japanese team took first place.

The runners-up were 25 individuals from the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC), led by Research Scientist Jerry Pratt, Research Associate Matt Johnson and Research Scientist Peter Neuhaus.  Their robot– called “Atlas”– was 6 feet tall, 330 pounds, and stood on two legs.

The team was confident going into the competition.

“Every day we have done a little better in practice,” team member Doug Stephen said in a statement. “So we’re feeling pretty good.”

“We are definitely ready,” said Jerry Pratt.  “We’ll use these last few days to practice the trial tasks, over and over, until we can do them in our sleep.”

The series is part of the Defense Department’s ongoing effort to engineer robotic technology for situations where human abilities are limited, including disaster sites.  Accordingly, the robots were judged for their ability to navigate eight physical tasks mimicking real-life situations.  They were evaluated for their mobility, manipulation, dexterity, perception, and operator control mechanisms.

The robots were made to drive cars and climb walls while on-site at the speedway.  They were also judged for their ease of operation by humans with little robotic training, and their ability to achieve partial autonomy in task-level decision making.

The IHMC team along with seven other qualifiers will advance to the final phase of the trials scheduled for late 2014.  At that time the robots will attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators. The winning team will receive $2 million in research funding.