The CERBERUS (CollaborativE walking & flying RoBots for autonomous ExploRation in Underground Settings) team has won the Systems Competition in the Final Event of the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The team, which includes two NCCR Robotics labs (Roland Siegwarts’ and Marco Hutter’s at ETH Zurich) and our spin-off Flyability, has prevailed among the 8 teams involved in the competition held in Louisville, Kentucky, and received the $ 2 million first place prize.
The Final Event combined elements from the previous three stages of the DARPA SubT Challenge: the “Tunnel Circuit”, the “Urban Circuit” and the “Cave Circuit”. In all circuits, teams could compete compete in one or both of two complementary research tracks: the Systems Competition, and the Virtual Competition.
For the Final Event, robots had to explore, search for objects (“artifacts”) of interest, and report their accurate location within underground tunnels, infrastructure similar to a subway, and natural caves and paths with extremely confined geometries, tough terrain, and severe visual degradation (including dense smoke).
Team CERBERUS deployed a diverse set of robots with the prime systems being four ANYmal C legged systems. In the Prize Round of the Final Event, the team won the competition and scored 23 points by correctly detecting and localizing 23 of 40 of the artifacts DARPA had placed inside the environment. The second team, “CSIRO Data61” also scored 23 points but reported the last artifact with a slight further delay to DARPA thus the tiebraker was in favor of Team CERBERUS. The third team, “MARBLE” scored 18 points.
Video: the CERBERUS concept
The announcement of the Final results
More info on the CERBERUS team:
https://www.subt-cerberus.org/
More info on the DARPA SubT Challenge
