Successful participation in robot competition
Team CERBERUS, an international consortium of scientists with major participation from ETH‘s Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, wins the DARPA Subterranean challenge and receives 2 million USD.
Over the course of three years, an international consortium consisting of the University of Nevada Reno, ETH Zurich, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), University of California Berkeley, University of Oxford, Flyability, and Sierra Nevada Corporation, developed various legged and aerial robots. These robots are capable of autonomously exploring diverse subterranean environments such as underground mines and tunnels, metropolitan sub-surface infrastructure, and natural cave networks. The project’s leadership team, which is headed by Professor Kostas Alexis (NTNU), also includes ETH Professor Marco Hutter of the Robotic Systems Lab and ETH Professor Roland Siegwart of the Autonomous Systems Lab. The project name external page CERBERUS stands for “CollaborativE walking & flying RoBots for autonomous ExploRation in Underground Settings”.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the Subterranean or external page "SubT" Challenge to encourage and find novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments. It is one of the world’s most challenging robot competitions. In the final competition, the team deployed four ANYmal legged robots developed by ETH Zurich and their spin-off ANYbotics, who were the fastest to find and localize the most hidden objects in the large-scale underground area.