The total potential payout for the winner will be $2 million — pocket change for the biggest defense company on the globe. And yet, Lockheed Martin Corp. is leading one of 25 teams in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's annual Robotics Challenge. And it's the only large contractor to do so.

The teams will vie for a chance to win one of three cash prizes totaling $3.5 million at the DARPA Robitics Challenge finals — the second crop of 14 teams, many of which are international, was just added last week. The finals, which will take place June 5-6 at Fairplex in Pomona, California, will require robots to attempt a circuit of consecutive physical tasks, with degraded communications between the robots and their operators.

If you scan the list of teams, one thing becomes pretty clear quickly — very few recognizable companies are among them. There are plenty of academic institutions, including Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and a couple robotics companies, including Torc Robotics, also in Blacksburg, and TRACLabs Inc. in Webster, Texas.

But then there's Lockheed (NYSE: LMT) — the company's Advanced Technology Laboratories specifically. It partnered with the Rensselaer Polytechnic University in Troy, New York, and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on "Team Trooper," guiding its Atlas humanoid robot through a number of tasks designed to simulate disaster response scenarios. And it's not new to this team, either. It took a top placement in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge — working across multiple platforms in creating autonomy and control software that can guide robots, the team noted in its website bio.

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