NEVADA: UNR team wins $2M in DARPA international robotics challenge
Team CERBERUS is an international consortium involving the University of Nevada, Reno, ETH Zurich, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, University of California, Berkeley, University of Oxford, Flyability and Sierra Nevada Corporation. The Team Leader is Professor Kostas Alexis, of Norwegian University’s Department of Engineering Cybernetics, who acquired the grant when he was a faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno, and has maintained his role as team leader since.
The University of Nevada, Reno's Team CERBERUS topped a stellar field of eight international robotics teams to win the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and $2 million in prize money.
The competition spanned three years and several locations with four competitions that tested the engineers’ abilities to develop a system of walking and flying robots equipped with multi-modal perception systems, navigation and mapping autonomy, and self-organized networked communications that enable robust and reliable navigation, exploration, mapping, and object search in complex, sensing-degraded, stringent, dynamic and rough underground settings.
“This competition brought together the very best in the entire world,” College of Engineering Dean Manos Maragakis said. “On the world stage, Professor Alexis and his team took the top honors, pushing their vital research forward and, in the process, paving the way for a better future for us all. Their hard work and dedication are not only inspirational but indicative of the globally competitive engineering and computer science education offered in the College of Engineering and the success of one of the strategic research focus areas in the College, one we created and supported over 10 years ago.”