Inspiring Field Robotics Advances through the Design of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Abstract

As the latest Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “Grand Challenge,” the Subterranean Challenge was a robotics competition that sought to stimulate innovation and investment in solutions that can rapidly map, navigate, and search complex environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground spaces, and natural cave networks. The program hosted a series of evaluations, namely, three Circuit Events and a Final Event, which assessed each competing team’s approaches in representative subterranean environments. This paper details the careful planning and intentional decisions that went into the design of the competition elements of the Final Event of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. Intended to offer both insights and motivations, this paper comprehensively describes the official rules, scoring objectives, artifact selection, environment setup, and scenario configurations, all in the context of driving towards advancing key technologies of interest to DARPA and to the field robotics community.