A behind the scene story about our team during the DARPA SubT Urban Circuit by IEEE Spectrum

Evan Ackerman from IEEE Spectrum compiled some curious ‘behind the scenes’ stories not seen on the live stream of the DARPA SubT Challenge Urban Circuit that took place last February.

Below is a quick one about our team, in a past world, where flying anywhere was easy 🙂

Team CSIRO Data61

I met CSIRO Data61 (based in Australia) at the testing location they’d found in a building at the Grays Harbor County Fairgrounds, right next to an indoor horse arena that provided an interesting environment, especially for their drones. During their first run, one of their large tracked robots (an ex-police robot called Titan) had the misfortune to get its track caught on an obstacle that was exactly the wrong size, and it burned out a couple motors trying to get free.

 

You can practically smell that through the screen, right? And these are fancy Maxon motors, which you can’t just pick up at your local hardware store. CSIRO didn’t have spares with them, so the most expedient way to get new motors that were sure to work turned out to be flying another team member over from Australia (!) with extra motors in their carry-on luggage. And by Tuesday morning, the Titan was up and running again.

Read more bits and pieces from the other teams here.

For all news about out participation in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, click here.

For more information, contact us.

 

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