DoD Wants Your Ideas on How to Operate, Navigate Underground by Kyle Rempfer - Military Times
Rising populations, denser urban areas and existing security threats are forcing military and civilian emergency workers underground. The ability to navigate these man-made tunnels and existing natural cave networks is the focus of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s newest initiative.
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge, or SubT, is soliciting proposals for new approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments, according to a DARPA statement. Teams from around the world are invited to submit their methods for tackling time-sensitive underground challenges by Jan. 8.
“One of the main limitations facing war fighters and emergency responders in subterranean environments is a lack of situational awareness; we often don’t know what lies beneath us,” said Timothy Chung, a program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “The DARPA Subterranean Challenge aims to provide previously unimaginable situational awareness capabilities for operations underground.”
The selected teams will use their innovative methods to map subsurface networks under conditions deemed too hazardous to send human first responders…