On Thursday, Darpa gathered roboticists in the Louisville Mega Cavern, in Kentucky, and gave them a mission: Design robots to navigate a grueling subterranean course of tunnels and caves, some of the most unforgiving environments on Earth. They’re calling it the Subterranean Challenge, but you may as well call it the Death to All Robots Challenge.

This event, which will begin next year, is a fundamentally different Darpa beast than the Darpa beasts that came before it. First the advanced tech agency ran the Grand Challenge, a desert race between autonomous vehicles that helped jumpstart the self-driving car revolution. Then it oversaw the Robotics Challenge, in which humanoid robots tried to open doors and drive carts, but mostly fell on their faces. The technical challenges with both were monumental, but the environments were relatively tame. Going underground, the robots in the Subterranean Challenge will face a particular kind of hell.

DARPA

Darpa will split this new competition into three circuits, each presenting the teams with fresh headaches. There’s the tunnel environment, a mess of passageways. And a cave environment, with crags and slopes and tight squeezes. And a bunker-like environment, which will be the most “structured,” or predictable, environment the robots will encounter. Still, that means the bots will have to flourish in an area optimized for human dexterity, perhaps including climbing stairs.

Teams (including participants from Carnegie Mellon, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, and Caltech) will tackle each circuit about six months apart, beginning with the tunnel circuit in August of next year. They’ll get multiple runs in each environment, and use their highest score. Then in August 2021, teams will gather to tackle the final event, a sort of mashup of the three different environments.

The central test for these teams will be whether their robots will be flexible enough to bounce between caves and tunnels and urban structures. “You may be a great swimmer but not a great runner or cyclist, but when you put them all together, it’s how you can handle all three of those events that allow you to cross the finish line,” Timothy Chung, program manager at Darpa, said at the event.

Scoring will revolve around objects of interest, what Darpa calls “artifacts.” These will be scattered throughout the subterranean environments, and will include survivors, radios, cell phones, and valves, as well as more nebulous artifacts like oxygen levels. The idea is for a team to detect and locate them as quickly as possible. The faster you do it, the more points you get.