WorldWide Drilling Resource

Unlocking the Subsurface with Robots Adapted from Information by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean (SubT) Challenge explores new approaches to rapidly map, navi- gate, and search underground environments. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s (CSIRO's) Data61 Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group is the only Australian entity competing in the SubT Challenge, and one of seven teams to receive up to $4.5 million in funding from DARPA across the three-year challenge. The Data61 team is made up of nearly 30 people from CSIRO's Data61 research group, students from Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland, as well as two funded partners. The team will create 3-D maps of underground environments through LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanners mounted on legged robots, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles capable of flying in global positioning system (GPS)-denied environments without a human controller. In 2017, Hovermap technology enabled the world's first fully autonomous beyond line-of-sight drone flight in an underground mine, nearly 2000 feet below the surface in Western Australia. “We're honored to be competing in DARPA's SubT Challenge, drawing on decades of experience in developing robots, sensing, and communica- tions systems for challenging environments like underground mines and caves,” said Fred Pauling, Robotics and Autonomous Systems’ group leader at CSIRO's Data61. Once developed, the robotics and network technology can help human first responders in understanding and exploring hazardous underground environments, providing unprecedented situational awareness in time-criti- cal scenarios such as disaster response. It also has applications across a range of industries including mining, transport, con- struction, and agriculture. 20 MAY 2019 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® I real ly l ike this magazine as it always gives a lot with regard to dri l l ing. Michael Rahe Ministry of Mines, Energy Water and Rural Electrification Solomon Islands MIN