DARPA Subteriterranean Challenge, DARPA, USA

Underground settings are becoming increasingly relevant to global security and safety. Rising populations and urbanization are requiring military and civilian first responders to perform their duties below ground in human-made tunnels, underground urban spaces, and natural cave networks. Recognizing that innovative, enhanced technologies could accelerate development of critical lifesaving capabilities, DARPA today announced its newest Grand Challenge: the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, or SubT for short.

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Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Systems teams are trekking toward the Urban Circuit after competing in the Tunnel Circuit, the first scored event of DARPA’s high-tech underground contest. Eleven teams from eight countries gathered in Pittsburgh, August 15-22, 2019, to attempt to map, identify, and report artifacts along the passages of two Pittsburgh mines.

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Ten teams arrived to Satsop Business Park in Elma, Washington, to compete in the Systems competition Feb. 18-27, 2020. Eight teams qualified to participate in the Virtual competition, which ran Jan. 23-30. Two teams participated in both Virtual and Systems events.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge seeks to better equip warfighters and first responders to explore human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks, while decreasing risk to human lives. The SubT Challenge Systems and Virtual competitions aim to create a community of multidisciplinary teams from wide-ranging fields to foster breakthrough technologies in autonomy, perception, networking, and mobility for underground environments. The Tunnel Circuit took place in August 2019. The Cave Circuit is planned for August 2020, and the Final Event incorporating all three underground environments is targeted for August 2021.

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Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots (CoSTAR) is developing robots that can autonomously explore caves, pits, tunnels and other subsurface terrain. Watch the team and their squad of robots prepare for the DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit during a practice run at Elma High School in Elma, Washington, in the days leading up to the competition.

Held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the competition is intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate and search underground. Technology developed for the competition

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Team website: https://costar.jpl.nasa.gov​​

for citations, please use:
"Thomas Touma, Jennifer G. Blank, Muhammad Fadhil Ginting, Christopher Patterson, and Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, “Mars Dogs: Biomimetic Robots for the Exploration of Mars, from its Rugged Surface to its Hidden Caves,” American Geophysical Union (AGU), San Francisco, CA, 2020."

This research was presented by NASA JPL's Team CoSTAR at the AGU Fall 2020 Conference. We presented the results of the first Martian Analog testing with autonomous quadruped, referred to as Au-Spot, comprised of the base locomotion platform from Boston Dynamics powered by NASA JPL's "NeBula" AI package which endows robots with a belief system and higher-levels of autonomy.

The current autonomous mobility systems for planetary exploration are wheeled rovers, limited to flat, gently-sloping terrains and agglomerate regolith. These vehicles cannot tolerate instability and operate within a low-risk envelope (i.e., low-incline driving to avoid toppling). Here, we present ‘Mars Dogs’ (MD), four-legged robotic dogs, the next evolution of extreme planetary exploration. MD is a novel system concept for acquiring science return from hard-to-access planetary surface & subsurface regions. MDs can negotiate extreme terrains using unique failure-recovery behaviors, providing a major breakthrough in planetary traversability. MDs are lightweight, compact, and fast-moving. A pack of MDs consists of three individual robotic units: one (Alpha-MD) equipped with a deep cave exploration payload including an arm; and two (Tether-MD) equipped with a tethering system. One of the units carries an MMRTG power supply. Each MD is equipped with sensors and deployable communication nodes to facilitate live, subterranean-to-surface data transmission.
Mars Dogs operate in synergy, exhibiting collaborative mobility behaviors to accomplish diverse missions that cannot be fulfilled by a single robot. An array of lava tubes on the southeastern flank of Pavonis Mons in the Tharsis Region of Mars offers an ideal location to release a pack of Mars Dogs. This region is of interest to scientists as it offers access to the Mars subsurface, where evidence of past or extant life may persist, and a potential shelter to future human inhabitants.

The MD concept has evolved from our experience using the stable and nimble Boston Dynamics “Spot” quadruped. We endowed Spot with a high-level autonomy/AI framework referred to as “NeBula”, developed by our JPL/Caltech Team CoSTAR. Our “Autonomous Spot” platform has advanced the current state-of-the-art in legged exploration and traversal of extreme and subsurface environments, propelling us to a 1st-place finish in the 2020 DARPA Subterranean Challenge with a system similar to that which we envision for Mars Dogs. Through a partnership with the NASA BRAILLE Team, we apply this technology to the exploration of lava tubes in N. California, an analog environment for future missions to volcanic caves on Mars.

This research was partially carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

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Talk Abstract: Is there life beyond Earth? The answer to this question leads us to voyage underground. Not only are planetary caves and subsurface voids some of the most likely places for life to be harbored and found, but they can also serve as potential habitats for human settlement. Targeting planetary cave exploration and keeping JPL’s national leadership in extreme environment autonomy, JPL is participating in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. This is the latest in the series of DARPA challenges, one the nation’s most prestigious competitions for the cutting-edge robotic technology development. JPL-led Team CoSTAR has developed an autonomy and AI framework for extreme environment exploration, called NeBula. This framework has been integrated on a variety of robots, including rovers, drones, and legged robots. NeBula successfully completed the mission in the first phase of the Challenge, leading to a second place finish worldwide.

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Is, or was, there life beyond Earth? For years, NASA has looked for signs of life on other planets. Now, they're one step closer. Here's how our partner @NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s autonomy and AI system, NeBula, enables Spot and a team of robots to autonomously explore hundreds of meters of Martian-like caves with no prior information about the map or features of the environment.

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This paper presents a novel strategy for autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. Tailored to the fact that subterranean settings, such as cave networks and underground mines, often involve complex, large-scale and multi-branched topologies, while wireless communication within them can be particularly challenging, this work is structured around the synergy of an onboard exploration path planner that allows for resilient long-term autonomy, and a multi-robot coordination framework. The onboard path planner is unified across legged and flying robots and enables navigation in environments with steep slopes, and diverse geometries. When a communication link is available, each robot of the team shares submaps to a centralized location where a multi-robot coordination framework identifies global frontiers of the exploration space to inform each system about where it should re-position to best continue its mission. The strategy is verified through a field deployment inside an underground mine in Switzerland using a legged and a flying robot collectively exploring for more than 45min, as well as a longer simulation study with three systems.

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Team Explorer, the SubT Challenge entry from CMU and Oregon State University, is in the last stage of preparation for the competition this month inside the Mega Caverns cave complex in Louisville, Kentucky.

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