A completely virtual environment may be the most realistic cave DARPA could possibly send robots into this fall.
The Pentagon's blue-sky projects administration launched the Subterranean Challenge in 2018, using prize money and a creative set of challenges to get teams of roboticists to design useful robots for exploring caves in both real and virtual environments.
So far, teams have run robots through physical gauntlets like tunnels and a never-finished nuclear reactor. Those courses have had real, tangible hurdles, like the weakness of signals underground, and the hard limitations of a finite human capacity to direct machines through signal relays.
The virtual challenges, which ran in parallel to the physical challenges, offer similar sets of objectives. The robots selected by the team must find a set of objects, from cell phones to lost back-packs to stand-ins for humans trapped underground. What makes the virtual environment so compelling is that the machines running inside these programmed caverns are running on pure code. There is no room for human intervention, for a careful handler to fix the errors of an automated machine.
On July 23rd, DARPA announced that the set of robots available for practice runs in the next virtual challenge included new designs. These include versions of the robots that ran the urban circuit back in February.
A completely virtual environment may be the most realistic cave DARPA could possibly send robots into this fall.
The Pentagon's blue-sky projects administration launched the Subterranean Challenge in 2018, using prize money and a creative set of challenges to get teams of roboticists to design useful robots for exploring caves in both real and virtual environments.
So far, teams have run robots through physical gauntlets like tunnels and a never-finished nuclear reactor. Those courses have had real, tangible hurdles, like the weakness of signals underground, and the hard limitations of a finite human capacity to direct machines through signal relays.
The virtual challenges, which ran in parallel to the physical challenges, offer similar sets of objectives. The robots selected by the team must find a set of objects, from cell phones to lost back-packs to stand-ins for humans trapped underground. What makes the virtual environment so compelling is that the machines running inside these programmed caverns are running on pure code. There is no room for human intervention, for a careful handler to fix the errors of an automated machine.
On July 23rd, DARPA announced that the set of robots available for practice runs in the next virtual challenge included new designs. These include versions of the robots that ran the urban circuit back in February.
Among the robots incorporated into the new virtual environment are a quadcopter-and-rolling platform combination, demonstrated by Team Explorer at the Urban Circuit. Designing machines for unfamiliar spaces means as often as not designing teams of compatible robots. Other innovations include a segmented robot with joint in the middle, for more flexible navigation of unfamiliar corridors and over rough surfaces.
As teams code designs for the virtual environment, they can run that code through practice courses over and over again, iterating changes in behavior until the environment is mastered. For the challenge itself, those same coded behaviors in virtual machines will have to explore a complex entirely new to the algorithm.
The pandemic has put the cave segment of the challenge on hold. While, in the past, virtual and physical challenges have run at the same time, this might be the perfect opportunity to let the simulated cave run its course, and allow teams building physical robots to learn lessons from the automated explorations.