While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

翻译：尽管近年来自主系统的能力稳步提升，但在无GPS辅助导航的情况下，这些系统仍难以快速探索未知环境。美国国防部高级研究计划局（DARPA）地下挑战赛旨在通过评估自主探索系统在真实世界地下搜救场景中的性能，加速其研发进程。地下环境给机器人系统带来诸多挑战，例如通信受限、拓扑结构复杂、视觉传感退化以及地形崎岖。本文提出的解决方案通过将强大且独立的单智能体自主栈与基于灵活网状网络的更高级别任务管理相结合，实现了极少人工监督下的长期自主能力。部署于四足机器人和轮式机器人上的自主套件完全独立运行，使人类监督者能够以松散方式监督任务并制定高影响力战略决策。我们还将讨论在SubT最终赛事中部署系统时获得的经验教训，涵盖车辆多样性、系统适应性及可重构通信等方面。