DARPA Subterranean Challenge: Q&A With Program Manager Timothy Chung

In an earlier post today, we distilled half a dozen DARPA-dense docs into an easy-to-follow overview of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT), a new competition that will task teams of humans and robots to explore complex underground environments. In this post, we have an interview with SubT program manager Timothy Chung, whom we met late last year at DARPA's D60 Conference. "I think for many of the technologies we're seeking to advance--it's one of those, aim for the moon, even if you miss you hit the stars type of an approach," he told us about the new challenge. "So we envision some component technologies being immediately operationally of value, but we've set the bar ambitiously high enough for it to be DARPA-worthy and also provide a vision for how that kind of impact could be magnified if and when we're successful." IEEE Spectrum: What are the SubT courses going to be like?