DARPA international robotics challenge won by University of Nevada, Reno team

by Mike Wolterbeek

The University of Nevada, Reno's Team CERBERUS topped a stellar field of eight international robotics teams to win the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and $2 million in prize money.

The competition spanned three years and several locations with four competitions that tested the engineers’ abilities to develop a system of walking and flying robots equipped with multi-modal perception systems, navigation and mapping autonomy, and self-organized networked communications that enable robust and reliable navigation, exploration, mapping, and object search in complex, sensing-degraded, stringent, dynamic and rough underground settings.

In the Final Event, held Sept. 24, DARPA designed an environment involving branches representing all three underground challenges of the “Tunnel Circuit”, the “Urban Circuit” and the “Cave Circuit”. Robots had to explore, search for objects or “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 second team, “CSIRO Data61” also scored 23 points but reported the last artifact with a slight further delay to DARPA thus the tiebraker was in favor of Team CERBERUS. The third team, “MARBLE” scored 18 points.

Read the entire article at Nevada Today: https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2021/cerberus