Cornelius, a large pig The robot, with its fat rubber tank, came to a stop in a small, verdant courtyard on the Spanish renaissance campus of California State University, Channel Islands.
“It is also autonomous or broken,” said Kevin Knoedler, squinting into the summer sunlight, his face obscured by a mask and a cap with ear flaps. Knoedler, who has been building robot for decades, knowing that it can be difficult to tell the difference between a kaput machine and a cogating machine.
“Autonomous,” said Andrew Her Order, a fourth-year mechatronic engineering student.
Suddenly, Cornelius burst into life. The robot lunges at a backpack lying on the ground about 15 feet away. But then, halfway through, it got stuck on a large rock.
“Oh no!” a third year student named Sara Centeno cried.
“It saw the backpack, and the way it’s programmed at the moment, it just mindlessly steers towards it,” Her Order said.
With some difficulty I gather that Cornelius is in “detection mode”, which forces it to search for backpacks, damned obstacles.
What may look like the usual job of robotics researchers anywhere is actually the feverish race, by a group known as the Coordinator, to a major world event. autonomous — the last round of Underground challengeorganized by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. In September 2021 — a few weeks from now — Cornelius and 20 other cyborgs on the Coordination team will be moving to Kentucky’s Louisville Mega Cavern to compete.
Darpa has hosted public challenges like SubT since 2004. They intend to attract talent from outside the hidden world of military research and development and start innovating on very difficult issues. — forecasting the spread of infectious diseases, such as satellite launches on short notice. inside First Darpa Challenge, a Humvee called the Sandstorm drove itself 7.4 miles in the Mojave Desert before overtaking a turn and getting stuck. In the next challenge a year later, five teams completed the full 132-mile run. Yesterday’s self-driving Humvee is tomorrow’s driverless taxi.
The SubT Challenge, which begins in 2018 and will end at the Mega Cavern, forces both robots and robots to confront the forbidden barrier that exists underground — poor visibility, poor connectivity, hidden terrain. It includes both physical and virtual competitions. In the final physical part, robots will traverse sweltering roads, climb stairs, and grapple through mud and fog — possibly even an avalanche — as they search for a course in the Mega Cavern to find “thermal mannequins” (i.e. people) and other “Artifacts.” In the virtual competition, simulated robots will do all of the same things inside the computerized drawing of the Mega Cavern course. Betting is 5 million dollars in prize money.
The premise of virtual competitions is that anyone with enough intelligence and access to a computer — for example, the quiet guy in dad jeans who tells football parents, when they ask, that he’s “making a tool for robotics”—can make a meaningful contribution to research. Knoedler (pronounced “nayd-ler”) excelled in these competitions. Darpa’s program manager for the SubT Challenge, Timothy Chung, calls him “an extraordinary software developer”, “very disciplined, methodical and practical”. But when the code has to interact with the real world, things get complicated. Knoedler quips that “you can solve 90% of the problems in simulation and the other 90% in robots.”
