Sep 8 2019
Robotika International, the creator of Robotika International Generalized Intelligent Driving System (RIGIDS), and Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, the leading life sciences university in the Czech Republic, have won the "Most Distinctive Robots" award at DARPA's Subterranean Challenge Tunnel Circuit competition, held August 15-22 at safety research and experimental mines near Pittsburgh, PA.
For the competition, Robotika International equipped its robots with the latest version of its autonomous driving engine, the last step in the pre-production validation process. DARPA subjected the robots to an incredibly inhospitable environment and set complex technical challenges for them to complete. Robotika's performance provided definitive proof that the newest version of RIGIDS is production-ready.
Today, Robotika International announced that RIGIDS v2.0 has been released and is available to customers.
"Robotika International participates in numerous robotics competitions in order to expose our autonomous driving platform to the most challenging scenarios and to participate in and provide support to the robotics community at the cutting edge of research, whether commercial, academic or enthusiast driven," said Martin Dlouhy, Robotika's CTO and Chief Scientist. "At the Tunnel Circuit of DARPA Subterranean Challenge, we introduced a broad collection of mobile platforms — recognized as the most distinctive among all the participants by DARPA — in order to validate our 'Self-drive anything' motto even in the most challenging environments of underground tunnels."
Faculty of Engineering of Czech University of Life Sciences Prague utilized its expertise with agricultural machinery to design and construct a mobile platform particularly well suited to tackle the challenges of traversing underground mines.
Milan Kroulik, associate professor and leader of the robotics group at the Faculty of Engineering said, "Our collaboration with Robotika International allows us to turn our research vehicles into autonomous ones shortly after their mechanical construction is completed by installing Robotika's self-driving suite. Further, Robotika's system allows easy integration of a variety of sensors into our measurement research platforms. The resulting vehicles are robust tools that significantly advance our research."