Team CoSTAR Won DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit

Team CoSTAR, a multi-university team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), won first place in the Urban Circuit of DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge. LIDS faculty member Luca Carlone was the MIT lead of the team, which also included LIDS student Yun Chang.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT Challenge) is intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate and search underground, as well as for future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.

In the Systems competition of the Urban Circuit, 10 teams from top universities and companies around the world navigated two courses winding through an unfinished nuclear power plant in Elma, Washington. The objective was to find and accurately identify artifacts in the power plant that represented items found in an urban underground setting.

In addition to coming in first place in last week’s Urban Circuit, Team CoSTAR, a collaboration between NASA JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners, including Clearpath Robotics and Boston Dynamics, came in second place on the Challenge’s Tunnel Circuit. The next phase of the competition, the Cave Circuit, will take place in August 2020.

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