![]() ![]() After attending MIT, where he studied computer engineering, he went to work for Teradyne, a company that develops automatic test equipment. That fascination stayed with him into adulthood. A TV ad touted its 16 different commands, which allowed it to “get out of a tricky spot,” “complete the mission,” and “head for home base.” Knoedler became fascinated with the idea of getting a machine to do something as efficiently and reliably as possible. The first robot that Knoedler remembers making an impression on him, as a 7-year-old in Colorado, was Big Trak, a six-wheeled programmable toy tank. Sara Centeno, a third-year student at CSU Channel Islands, solders a communications beacon, which the robots use to relay messages underground. Knoedler quips that “you can solve 90 percent of the problem in the simulation and the other 90 percent on the robots.” Darpa’s program manager for the SubT Challenge, Timothy Chung, calls him “a phenomenal software developer,” “very disciplined and methodical and practical.” But when the code has to interact with the real world, things get complicated. Knoedler (pronounced “nayd-ler”) excels at these contests. The premise of the virtual competitions is that anyone with enough smarts and access to a computer-say, the quiet guy in dad jeans who tells fellow soccer parents, when they ask, that he “does robotics stuff”-can contribute meaningfully to the research. In the final physical contest, robots will snake through claustrophobic passages, clamber up stairs, and struggle through mud and fog-maybe even mock avalanches-as they search a course in the Mega Cavern for “thermal mannequins” (i.e., humans) and other “artifacts.” In the virtual competition, simulated robots will do all the same things inside a computerized rendering of the Mega Cavern course. It consists of both a physical competition and a virtual one. The SubT Challenge, which kicked off in 2018 and will conclude in the Mega Cavern, forces both robot and roboticist to confront the forbidding set of hurdles that exist underground-poor visibility, bad connectivity, hidden topography. Yesterday’s self-driving Humvee is tomorrow’s driverless taxi. In the follow-up challenge a year later, five teams finished the full 132-mile course. In the first Darpa challenge, a Humvee called Sandstorm autonomously drove 7.4 miles in the Mojave Desert before overshooting a turn and getting stuck. They’re meant to draw talent from beyond the hermetic world of military R&D and jump-start innovation on very hard problems-forecasting the spread of an infectious disease, say, or launching a satellite on short notice. In September 2021-a few weeks from now-Cornelius and the 20-odd other robots in the Coordinated fleet will be trucked off to Kentucky’s Louisville Mega Cavern to compete.ĭarpa has held public challenges like SubT since 2004. What might look like the quotidian work of robotics undergrads anywhere is actually the fevered run-up, by a team known as Coordinated Robotics, to a huge event in the world of autonomy-the final round of the Subterranean Challenge, hosted by the US government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. This article appears in the March 2022 issue.
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