Robot autonomy tested in Subterranean Challenge competition

The Subterranean Challenge (SubT) wrapped its second round of competition on Feb. 27 in Elmira, WA. The winning competitor was CoSTAR (or Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots), a team that included 60 individuals and 12 robots, led by the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA.

SubT is split into four competitions over three years. This most recent competition took place in an unfinished power plant. The power plant location also featured challenges like a warm air vent and a carbon monoxide leak. The robots were tasked with finding 20 predetermined objects and navigating different locations. They scored points for each successful find. CoSTAR found 20 objects, while the second place team, Carnegie Mellon University’s Explorer team, found 11 of those objects.

This competition tests the autonomy of programmed robots. The robots send information back to the human supervisor, after remaining in radio contact for the first 100 feet of exploration. Once they move out of that range, the robots are expected to decide what to do – keep going or return to the team to provide information. Sometimes  the robot may need to collaborate with other robots to reach the next level of the course.

The CoSTAR team includes JPL; Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA; MIT; KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology); Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology; and industry partners.

“These courses are very, very challenging, and most of the difficulty lies in communicating with the robots after they’ve gone out of range,” said CoSTAR team lead Ali Agha, of JPL. “That’s critical for NASA: We want to send robots into caves on the Moon or Mars, where they have to explore on their own.”

Next up, is a competition in August in an undisclosed natural cave network. The final circuit is scheduled for August 2021.

Competitors in the final circuit will have the opportunity to win up to $2 million in funding from DARPA.