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Darpa is a name you see around here quite a bit. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, if you want to spell out the full thing, is a Pentagon research arm that wills new tech moonshots into reality. It had a direct hand in creating the internet, graphical user interfaces, and other groundbreaking technologies.
What's cooking now?
The agency is currently holding the Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The competition hopes to push along robotics and AI tech that can quickly map, navigate, and search "complex underground environments" like caves, tunnels, mines, and the most complex of all, the NYC subway system.
Underground environments are dangerous job sites for humans, and connectivity challenges make remote operations down there difficult. Darpa wants to develop machines with AI smarts to sub in for humans and complete tasks on their own.
As I write this, competitors are sending robots and drones through the Urban Circuit underground test course.
- There are two tracks: Systems and Virtual. Systems incorporates physical machines, and Virtual involves algorithms crawling through digital simulations.
- And there are two types of competitors: Darpa-backed and self-funded.
The prize pot ain't so bad. In the final SubT event next year, the Systems winner will take home $2 million, while up to $200,000 will be disbursed to self-funded teams. The Virtual winner gets $1.5 million, and up to $500,000 in additional prizes is available for self-funded teams.
If history's any guide...
Darpa-led tech competitions, which incentivize basic and applied research, often lay the groundwork for technologies that are later commercialized. The example that comes to mind is the Grand Challenge, a series of three driverless car competitions in the 2000s.
- Some of the roboticists and coders who took part went on to start driverless vehicle companies including Waymo, Argo, and Nuro.
Zoom out: Darpa's chief benefactor—and customer—is the Department of Defense. Darpa says it wants to put SubT technology to use in warfighting and emergency response situations.