The vehicles work together to perform assigned tasks: for example, a ground robot might begin exploration but come to an unnavigable roadblock, at which point a flying drone might be called in to explore beyond the roadblock. Like other teams, CoSTAR has a diverse fleet of different types of robots, including a hybrid rolling/flying robot, a tracked tank-like robot, and small flying drones that can navigate tunnels. Team CoSTAR (Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient Robots), led by JPL Robotics Technologist Ali Agha, includes JPL, Caltech, MIT, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and Sweden's Lulea University of Technology. In the tunnel competition, there were 11 teams, most made up of consortia of research institutions and private companies.

For the final, the remaining teams will compete in an event that combines all three environments.īalto competed in the August 2019 tunnel-navigation section of the DARPA SubT Challenge. Teams that fail to perform well enough in any stage can be disqualified. In the second stage, to be held in Februrary 2020, the team will compete in an urban underground environment in the third, in August 2020, they move to a cave. The August competition, a tunnel-navigation task, was the first of three stages leading up to a final event in August 2021. Teams earn points by accurately identifying and mapping artifacts that represent items a first responder might find underground: items like a cell phone, backpack, or even a thermal manikin that simulates a survivor. The SubT Challenge is an international competition sponsored by DARPA to advance technologies to autonomously map, navigate, and search underground environments. Truck-like robot will be a probe for exploring underground arenasĪ robot designed and built by undergraduate students at Caltech working with graduate students at Caltech and JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, took to the field in the first phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean (SubT) Challenge this summer, where the Caltech-JPL team took second place.

Robot radio scrambler