Team CERBERUS wins DARPA Subterranean Challenge, takes home $2 million in prize money

Team CERBERUS, which included indoor drone company Flyability, has won DARPA’s three-year-long Subterranean Challenge. DARPA first announced its Subterranean (SubT) Challenge in 2018. The goal of the competition was to “develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground”—or, as IEEE Spectrum put it, “to get teams of robots doing useful stuff in challenging underground environments.”

The underground environments DARPA wanted to test in the competition included
human-made ones, like subway systems, sewers, and mines, and natural ones, like caves and tunnels.

“Flyability is honoured and proud to have been part of the CERBERUS team, winners of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge,” says Adrien Briod, Co-Founder and CTO at Flyability. “At Flyability we are committed to turning innovations into products that solve customer pains, with the primary goal of using robotics to keep people out of dangerous situations.”

Starting in 2019, DARPA hosted a Tunnel Event and an Urban Event to test the technology competitors were developing for the SubT Challenge and winnow the competition. (A Cave Event planned for 2020 was cancelled due to the pandemic.)

The final competition of the challenge took place in Louisville, KY last week at the Louisville Mega Cavern, a massive former limestone mine so big it houses a ropes course, mountain bike park, and tram-guided tours.

Finalists in the competition had to navigate environments that incorporated elements from all three previous events, including confined spaces built to simulate underground mines, metropolitan infrastructure, and cave systems. They were faced with visual degradation during operations, including smoke.

To win, robots from each team had to explore these environments and find objects of
interest—called artifacts—that had been placed there by DARPA SubT Challenge organizers.

Once found, the robots had to report the accurate location of the artefact. Each artefact was worth one point.

Team CERBERUS won by accurately finding and locating 23 artefacts out of the 40 total presents. Second place winner Team CSIRO Data61 also scored 23 points but it reported the final artefact more slowly, giving the win to Team CERBERUS. Third place winner was Team MARBLE, with a score of 18.

“Our team coined early on the idea of legged and flying robot combination,” says Dr. Kostas Alexis, Director of the Autonomous Robots Lab at NTNU and Team CERBERUS’ Team Lead.

“We have remained focused on this core vision of ours and also bring fully own-developed hardware for both legged and flying systems. This is both our advantage and—in a way—our limitation as we [have spent] a lot of time in its development.”

The DARPA SubT Challenge pushed the limits of autonomy and underground robotics
technology. All of the teams that made it to the finals developed and demonstrated
technology that has the potential to make a big impact on sectors that rely on underground operations, including mining, wastewater inspections, and search & rescue.

The primary robots that Team CERBERUS used in the Final Event were four ANYmal C systems.

About Flyability
Flyability is a Swiss company building solutions for the inspection and exploration of indoor, inaccessible, and confined spaces. By allowing drones to be used safely inside buildings, it enables industrial companies and inspection professionals to reduce downtime, inspection costs, and risks to workers. With hundreds of customers in over 50 countries in Power Generation, Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Maritime, Infrastructures & Utilities, and Public Safety, Flyability has pioneered and continues to lead the innovation in the commercial indoor drone space.

www.flyability.com / @fly_ability

About Team CERBERUS

Team CERBERUS is an international consortium that includes the University of Nevada Reno (UNR), ETH Zurich, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of California Berkeley, the University of Oxford, Flyability, and the Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Team Lead is Professor Dr. Kostas Alexis of NTNU’s Department of Engineering Cybernetics, who acquired the grant that funded this effort when he was a faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno, and has maintained this role since. Team leadership also includes Professor Dr. Marco Hutter (Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich), Professor Dr. Roland Siegwart (Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich), Professor Dr. Mark Mueller (UC Berkeley), Professor Maurice Fallon (Oxford), Adrien Briod (Flyability), Professor Dr. Eelke Folmer (UNR), and Sierra Nevada Corporation’s company leaders. CERBERUS stands for “CollaborativE walking & flying RoBots for autonomous ExploRation in Underground
Settings.”

More information can be found at https://www.subt-cerberus.org/