DARPA Sends Robots To The Caves

 

 

The Sub-T Challenge “seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios.”

The ultimate goal of the tunnel challenge is for teams to remotely map, identify and report the greatest number of artifacts along the mines’ passages. Teams had to provide the exact coordinates of the items.

 

For four days, the eleven teams took turns making runs through the two on-site mines. Each team got two full attempts, from start to finish, and the clock runs out after one hour.

Teams can run their robot fleet into and out of the cave up to four times—which is good because things could break.

Teams are told what they’re looking for in advance

Eventually, teams learned how well their robots could withstand the tactical challenges that DARPA put inside the mines.

During those extremely hot August days, eleven teams vied for the $200,000 prize (and the included robotic street cred), which include a red backpack, mannequins, fire extinguishers and drills. There were about 10-30 artifacts in total and the locations of each changed in between each team’s turns.

The teams—mostly composed of researchers, roboticists, mechanical engineers, and even some industry experts—took turns setting up their creations at the mouths of the caves, preparing to find the most artifacts. Most were calibrating drones or ground robots before the clock started running. Everyone paid special attention to their communications strategy, which turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of the Sub-T Challenge.