Complex underground environments present significant challenges for the autonomy, perception, networking, and mobility of robots operating in time-sensitive disaster response scenarios. In 2017, DARPA created the Subterranean Challenge to stimulate innovation and investment in solutions that can rapidly map, navigate, and search complex environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks. The program is hosting a series of evaluations, namely, the three Circuit Events and the Final Event, which assess each competing team’s approaches in representative subterranean environments. This paper provides an overview of the program and the results from the Circuits Stage of the competition
As robotics and autonomous technologies continue to see breakthrough innovations, specifically in the areas of large-scale multi-robot teams, their alignment with operationally relevant applications in fielded contexts has been necessary to both obtaining valuable user feedback as well as informing and refining the use cases themselves, i.e., co-evolving the concepts of operations alongside technology maturation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program1 was a four-year program which actively embraced this iterative, mission-focused development approach, coupling technology innovation with field experimentation activities to rapidly advance capabilities for large-scale, heterogeneous robotic teams in complex and adversarial urban environments. This vision paper highlights the motivation for the OFFSET program; provides descriptions of the technical objectives and outcomes; and offers insights into the program structure designed to facilitate and inject technology innovations through an ambitious campaign of field tests and learning.
As the latest Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “Grand Challenge,” the Subterranean Challenge was a robotics competition that sought to stimulate innovation and investment in solutions that can rapidly map, navigate, and search complex environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground spaces, and natural cave networks. The program hosted a series of evaluations, namely, three Circuit Events and a Final Event, which assessed each competing team’s approaches in representative subterranean environments. This paper details the careful planning and intentional decisions that went into the design of the competition elements of the Final Event of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Intended to offer both insights and motivations, this paper comprehensively describes the official rules, scoring objectives, artifact selection, environment setup, and scenario configurations, all in the context of driving towards advancing key technologies of interest to DARPA and to the field robotics community.
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