Prof. Nick Wang led Team NCTU to participate the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge to explore new approaches of mobility, perception, autonomy, and communication to navigate, map, and search underground environments with hazards, often too high-risk for personnel to enter. 11 Teams from around the world competed the first circuit event in tunnel environments in Pittsburgh on August 15-22. The participated teams include top universities and organization: NASA JPL, MIT, ETH Zurich, UC Berkeley, Cal Tech, KAIST etc. Each team completed four total runs, two 60-minute runs on each of two courses, Experimental and Safety Research. The courses varied in difficulty and included 20 artifacts each. Novel methods were proposed for tackling these time-critical scenarios through unknown courses in mapping subsurface networks and unpredictable conditions. Team NCTU ranked the 7th among the 11 remarkable teams.

Teams earned points by searching for, detecting, and providing spatially referenced locations of artifacts within a five-meter accuracy. An “artifact” (fire extinguisher, backpack) is an object or feature of interest.
Team NCTU propose a team of ground and aerial blimp vehicles, which is low power consumption and collision-tolerance compared to other aerial vehicles like drones. 
Due to the limited visibility, dust, or even smoke-filled tunnel environments. We develop multi-modal perception include vision, sound, and mmWave.
Maintaining communication and localization accuracy back to base station while robots travel hundreds of meters underground are challenging. We designed as deployable network nodes deployed into the environments to enable mesh network in unknown environments..

DARPA is a prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense, and has been the forefront of AI and robotics technologies, including the DARPA Grand Challenge 2004-2007 which was the pioneer for the developments of the autonomous driving today. DARPA SubT Challenge aims at exploring new approaches to search underground environments with hazards, often too high-risk for personnel to enter. Our goal is to develop validated prototype systems with novel designs that transform our ability to operate in such extreme environments. The success of the proposal represents the advances of technologies for the frontier research for disaster relief of saving life, such as the fire department, as well as the critical needs of independence for national defense in Taiwan.