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Mining Technology

As part of DARPA’s final challenge

Global edition
As part of DARPA’s final challenge
autonomous robotic vehicles

A fleet of robots from Carnegie Mellon University is headed to Kentucky for the ultimate challenge of its capability to independently maneuver an unexpected, underground course after practicing in an abandoned limestone mine and an unfinished sanatorium outside of Pittsburgh.

The task navigates a tunnel near Louisville, Kentucky, and gathers as many objects as possible in one hour. The goal is to develop self-driving robots to complement military and first responders’ search and rescue missions.

The catch: With just one operator and a fleet of up to a dozen robots, the devices must be capable of moving and making choices individually.

Sebastian Scherer, a co-lead for CMU’s team and an associate research professor at the Robotics Institute, stated, “At the core of this issue, it’s really a problem of investigation.” “You’re approaching an unknown environment, so there is a lot of uncertainty, and the robot has to be able to decide what to do when faced with uncertainty.”

According to Martial Hebert, dean of the School of Machine Learning, DARPA has hosted roughly comparable races in the past, and CMU has made a name for itself in a variety of competitions, running the gamut from those focused o
n self-driving technology to those programming computers that aids in language translation and manuscript understanding

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A Pittsburgh team won the DARPA Urban Competition in 2007, a competition to develop a self-driving car that could negotiate traffic, merge, and park. As a result, advancements in self-driving vehicle research were made, prompting several team members to establish a business, such as Aurora and Argo AI.

About the author

Mo Shine

Mo Shine

Lead Strategist, African Infrastructure & Diplomacy

Mo Shine covers the geopolitics, logistics and diplomacy of critical-mineral extraction in the Global South, with a focus on how African statecraft shapes what investors and operators can actually build. He spent more than a decade in newspaper journalism, as sub-editor and executive editor, and has worked with Skillings since 2009.

His current work tracks the Lobito Corridor and other Western-backed rail routes, and what they change for working capital, regional diplomacy and operator resilience across the Central African Copperbelt.


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