The Pentagon's $82 Million Super Bowl of Robots

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The Pentagon’s $82 Million Super Bowl of Robots

Inside a three-year competition that raises the question: How long until humans are obsolete?

By David Montgomery
NOVEMBER 10, 2021

One afternoon in late September, a yellow four-legged robot called Spot pranced and pirouetted on a replica of a dingy subway platform that had been constructed inside a vast limestone cavern burrowed beneath the Louisville Zoo. Spot snooped around the platform, inhaling data through cameras and sensors arrayed on its vacuum-cleaner-size torso. The robot’s little feet kept darting perilously close to the edge of the platform, then back to safety. Finally, apparently satisfied by what it had learned, Spot nimbly descended a staircase to make further investigations on the track bed. Back on the now-deserted platform, a poster on the wall declared: “The Future Is Now.”

And what a future. In this scenario, meticulously constructed for the finale of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge — an elaborate three-year, $82 million Pentagon robotics competition — something bad has happened to humans underground, and the robots are coming to the rescue. Spot and its robo-teammates and competitors — dozens of walking, driving and flying robots — were on a scavenger hunt for “survivors” (mannequins giving off body heat and vocal sounds) and objects such as cellphones, backpacks and helmets. The robots scored points by sending the objects’ locations back to their human teammates. Finding all the objects meant exploring a trap-filled labyrinth with a half-mile of passages, featuring three made-from-scratch environments: urban, with a subway, storeroom and offices; a tunnel (a mock mine shaft); and a cave, a claustrophobic mash-up of spelunking’s greatest hits.

The competition was a major test of the proposition that someday teams of robots could help first responders assess disaster zones before risking human lives. It also marked an audacious step toward robot independence, since the robots would have to do their work mostly beyond human control. Eight teams, comprising more than 100 of the world’s top roboticists, followed the action remotely (and somewhat helplessly) from underground staging areas. They’d been lured not just by the $3.5 million prize purse — $2 million for first, $1 million for second, $500,000 for third — but also the potential for professional bragging rights.

All of this was a science fiction fantasy just three years ago. That’s when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — DARPA, the Pentagon division dedicated to driving breakthrough technology — invited leading roboticists to compete. Months later, they gathered in a gold mine near Denver for an introduction to the SubT Challenge, as it’s known. Until then, robots’ limited role in disaster zones or on bomb squads had typically required a human controller guiding a single robot with a joystick or a tether. And while robots are increasingly common in retail and manufacturing, they tend to perform preprogrammed routines or operate in pristine, structured environments. Rarely, if ever, had teams of robots been asked to collaborate autonomously and explore rugged, unknown terrain. There would be no GPS in the SubT Challenge, so the robots would have to make and share their own maps with one another. Plus, there would be spotty WiFi, so the robots would have to build their own communications networks. No single robot possessed all the capabilities required, so squads of different types of robots would have to be equipped with perception, mobility, decision-making and networking abilities that had never been deployed together in real-world scenarios.

“We had no technology for this three years ago when DARPA started this program,” says Steven Willits, a member of a team from Carnegie Mellon University. “Nobody in the world was able to do anything like this.”

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David Montgomery is a staff writer for the magazine.

[tulipsandroses]

1. Rise of the machines!

Interesting stuff. Thanks for posting.