Interns Lead the Way in DARPA Robotics Challenge
To gain an edge in one of the world's premier robotics competitions, JPL brought in a team of experts at the forefront of their field: college students.
Client: NASA JPL Education
The Brief: A JPL team competed in the premier DARPA Robotics Challenge with help from interns selected for their unique expertise. While JPL’s Media Relations team had covered the competition itself, stakeholders in the Education Office wanted to spotlight the students’ contributions. I wrote this retrospective to highlight the interns’ vital role and show the impact of JPL’s internship programs on both the students and the Lab.
Excerpt:
You know that movie trope where a talented mastermind recruits a ragtag team of experts to pull off a seemingly impossible task. That's what I imagine when Ali Agha talks about the more than 30 interns brought to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to take part in one of the world's premier robotics competitions.
In 2018, a group led by Agha was one of only 12 teams chosen worldwide to compete in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, Subterranean Challenge, a three-year-long competition that concluded this past September and brought together some of the brightest minds in robotics. Their goal was to develop robotic systems for underground rescue missions, or as Agha puts it, "solutions that are so state-of-the-art, there's not even a clear definition of what you're creating."
Calling themselves Team CoSTAR, which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient Robots, the group also included engineers from Caltech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology, and several industry partners.
Interns from across the country and around the world came to JPL to help conceive of, build, and test CoSTAR – a coordinated rescue team of flying, crawling, and rolling robots designed to operate autonomously, or with little to no help from humans. But the interns didn't just come to the laboratory to learn from engineers already well versed in building robots to explore extreme environments. In many cases, the interns were the experts.