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DARPA Subterranean Challenge: Revolutionize how we operate in the underground domain.

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Complex underground settings present significant challenges for military and civilian first responders. The hazards vary drastically across domains that can degrade or change over time and are often too high-risk for personnel to enter. The DARPA Subterranean or “SubT” Challenge seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios.

The Mobile Robot Lab has joined the CSIRO Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) group to develop a heterogeneous and fully autonomous team of robots that will cooperate to autonomously, efficiently and robustly map, navigate and search in an unknown subterranean environment. This is a revolutionary concept that will significantly exceed the capability and performance of currently deployed systems in terms of autonomy, endurance, range, and terrainability.

The robots will coordinate with each other to complete the mission using the field-proven MissionLab software, which the Georgia Tech Mobile Robots Lab will adapt and enhance for subterranean operation. The robot team will consist of an ultralight walking/rolling hexapod robot, based on CSIRO’s revolutionary ultralight design paradigm, and a dockable fully autonomous drone, based on the CSIRO-developed ​ Hovermap​ drone autonomy and mapping technology. Objects of interest will be detected by a learning-based detector operating on combined visual and geometric sensor data, then geolocated and transmitted to the operator at the surface for verification.

 
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