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Students from the Carnegie Mel...A team of students from the Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State University is building a robot specifically for navigating subterranean environments such as mines, underground tunnels or caves. The team is one among many competing in DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge for an amazing $2 million reward. This challenge aims to develop robots that would be helpful in search and rescue operations during cave-ins, collapses, and natural disasters. Other applications would include mapping, navigation and exploration missions to places where no human can enter.
It is definitely an ambitious undertaking on part of the government to stimulate innovation in the field of search and rescue in dangerous environments where it is often very expensive and difficult to get to the trapped victims. Mining accidents often result in miners dying of suffocation, starvation, inhaling toxic fumes, and so on. It is extremely difficult for rescue operators to save all victims in such scenarios.
The robots developed by the team from Carnegie Mellon include a ground rover that can work in tandem with a drone consisting of six rotors. The ground rover is equipped with cameras and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to help it explore, navigate and map dark underground terrains that are unsafe for humans to venture into. If it encounters insurmountable obstacles like debris, the drone is then programmed to lift off and carry on with the mapping.
The development of these robots is still not complete, but the team is hopeful of bagging the prize.