Here come the outsiders of the Robot Olympics

Cornelius, the size of a pig a robot with thick rubber feet on the tank, stopped in a small, green courtyard on the Spanish Revival campus of California State University, Channel Islands.

“It’s either autonomous or it’s broken,” says Kevin Nodler, squinting at the summer sun, his face hidden by a mask and a hat with ears. Knoedler, who has been making robots for decades, knows that it can be difficult to tell the difference between a machine that is a coat and one that thinks.

“Autonomous,” says Andrew Herdering, a fourth-year mechatronics specialist.

Suddenly Cornelius comes to life. The robot rushes to a backpack lying on the ground about 15 feet. But then, in the middle of his journey, he hung on a large rock.

“Oh no!” third year named Sarah Senteno cries.

“He saw the backpack and the way it’s programmed right now, it’s just pointless moving towards it,” says Herdering.

I have a hard time understanding that Cornelius is in “detection mode,” which forces him to look for backpacks, damn obstacles.

What may seem like the daily work of robotics students everywhere is actually the hectic recourse by a team known as Coordinated Robotics to a major event in the world of autonomy – the latest round of the Subterranean Challenge organized by the US Government’s Advanced Research Agency. projects in defense or Darpa. In September 2021, in a few weeks, Cornelius and 20 other Coordinated Fleet robots will be flown to the Louisville Mega Cave in Kentucky to compete.

Darpa has been running public challenges like SubT since 2004. They aim to attract talent beyond the airtight world of military research and development and launch innovations on very serious issues – predicting the spread of an infectious disease, say, or launching a satellite. note. In Darpa’s first challenge, a Humvee called Sandstorm drove 7.4 miles autonomously in the Mojave Desert before skipping a bend and getting stuck. In the next challenge a year later, five teams completed the full 132-mile course. Yesterday’s self-driving Humvee is tomorrow’s driverless taxi.

The SubT Challenge, which starts in 2018 and will end in the Mega Cave, forces both a robot and a robot to face the prohibitive set of obstacles that exist underground – poor visibility, poor connectivity, hidden topography. It consists of both physical and virtual competition. In the last physical race, the robots will sneak through claustrophobic passages, climb stairs and fight through mud and fog – maybe even imitation avalanches – while searching for a course in the Mega Cave for “thermal mannequins” (ie people). and other “artifacts.” In the virtual competition, the simulated robots will do the same things in a computer display of the Mega Cavern course. There is a $ 5 million cash prize on the card.

The premise of virtual competitions is that anyone with enough intelligence and access to a computer – say, the quiet man in dad’s jeans who tells his fellow football parents when they ask him to “do things from robotics” – can make meaningful contributions. for the study. Knoedler (pronounced “nayd-ler”) excels in these competitions. Darpa’s program manager for the SubT Challenge, Timothy Chung, called him a “phenomenal software developer”, “very disciplined, methodical and practical”. But when the code has to interact with the real world, things get complicated. Knoedler jokingly says that “you can solve 90 percent of the problem in the simulation, and the other 90 percent in the robots.”