The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was designed for competitors to develop and deploy teams of autonomous robots to explore difficult unknown underground environments. Categorised in to human-made tunnels, underground urban infrastructure and natural caves, each of these subdomains had many challenging elements for robot perception, locomotion, navigation and autonomy. These included degraded wireless communication, poor visibility due to smoke, narrow passages and doorways, clutter, uneven ground, slippery and loose terrain, stairs, ledges, overhangs, dripping water, and dynamic obstacles that move to block paths among others. In the Final Event of this challenge held in September 2021, the course consisted of all three subdomains. The task was for the robot team to perform a scavenger hunt for a number of pre-defined artefacts within a limited time frame. Only one human supervisor was allowed to communicate with the robots once they were in the course. Points were scored when accurate detections and their locations were communicated back to the scoring server. A total of 8 teams competed in the finals held at the Mega Cavern in Louisville, KY, USA. This article describes the systems deployed by Team CSIRO Data61 that tied for the top score and won second place at the event.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge planned to develop novel approaches to rapidly map, explore and search underground environments in time-sensitive operations critical for the civilian and military domains alike. In the Final Event, DARPA designed an environment involving branches representing all three challenges of the "Tunnel Circuit", the "Urban Circuit" and the "Cave Circuit". Robots had to explore, search for objects ("artifacts") of interest, and report their accurate location within underground tunnels, infrastructure similar to a subway, and natural caves and paths with extremely confined geometries, tough terrain, and severe visual degradation (including dense smoke). Team CERBERUS deployed a diverse set of robots with the prime systems being four ANYmal C legged systems. In the Prize Round of the Final Event, the team won the competition and scored 23 points by correctly detecting and localizing 23 of 40 of the artifacts DARPA had placed inside the environment.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground. On July 20, Dr Timothy Chung, the DARPA SubTChallenge Program Manager, joined Silicon Valley Robotics to discuss the upcoming Cave Circuit and Subterranean Challenge Finals, and the opportunities that still exist for individual and team entries in both Virtual and Systems Challenges, as per the video below. The SubT Challenge allows teams to demonstrate new approaches for robotic systems to rapidly map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks. The SubT Challenge is organized into two Competitions (Systems and Virtual), each with two tracks (DARPA-funded and self-funded). Teams in the Systems Competition completed four total runs, two 60-minute runs on each of two courses, Experimental and Safety Research.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground. The SubT Challenge allows teams to demonstrate new approaches for robotic systems to rapidly map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks. The SubT Challenge is organized into two Competitions (Systems and Virtual), each with two tracks (DARPA-funded and self-funded). The Cave Circuit, the final of three Circuit events, is planned for later this year. Final Event, planned for summer of 2021, will put both Systems and Virtual teams to the test with courses that incorporate diverse elements from all three environments.

This weekend, nine teams of robots (and their humans) will make their way to the Edgar Experimental Mine in Idaho Springs, Colo. DARPA SubT is a challenge on a similar scale to DARPA's incredible Robotics Challenge that took place in 2015--a series of competitions based on real-world needs, attracting some of the best roboticists in the world with sophisticated robotic hardware to match. The integration exercise (which is closed to anyone but the participating teams, we definitely asked) is just the first step in a challenge that will involve both a virtual competition and a competition for physical systems, each with multiple circuits culminating in a final that wraps everything together into one epic event. Some teams will get over US $4 million in DARPA funding, and the prize pool for the finals is up to $2 million. We'll be following SubT through multiple stages all the way until the final event, which is schedule for August of 2021.