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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 09 2020, @01:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the radiation-sniffer dept.

DARPA Challenge Autonomous Robot Teams To Navigate Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant:

Robots might be finding their footing above ground, but today's autonomous robots have a difficult time operating underground. DARPA wanted to give the state of the art a push forward, so they are running a Subterranean (SubT) Challenge which just wrapped up its latest round. A great review of this Urban Circuit competition (and some of the teams participating in it) has been published by IEEE Spectrum. This is the second of three underground problem subdomains presented to the participants, six months apart, preparing them for the final event which will combine all three types.

If you missed the livestream or prefer edited highlight videos, they're all part of DARPAtv's Subterranean Challenge playlist. Today it starts with a compilation of Urban Circuit highlights and continues to other videos. Including team profiles, video walkthrough of competition courses, actual competition footage, edited recap videos, and the awards ceremony. Half of the playlist are video from the Tunnels Circuit six months ago, so we can compare to see how teams performed and what they've learned along the way. Many more lessons were learned in the just-completed Urban Circuit and teams will spend the next six months improving their robots. By then we'll have the Caves Circuit competition with teams ready to learn new lessons about operating robots underground.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @01:58AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @01:58AM (#968375)

    Better to navigate damaged nuclear power plants, no? Also teach them how to use all that radiation down there to keep the batteries charged. It would be like moths around a light bulb. Then they would mutate into a giant collossal autonomous robot and stomp around Vegas, but Godzilla will rescue us! Always does...

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Monday March 09 2020, @05:06AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday March 09 2020, @05:06AM (#968421)

    That was my immediate response as well, some high-tech gizmo that can walk around an unfinished concrete building is going to last a minute or two inside an actual (damaged) reactor as the radiation shuts it down. You need insanely fault-tolerant systems, not super high-tech fancy ones.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @06:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2020, @06:50PM (#968594)

      They could use this in non-nuclear situations.