Over a year ago I hand-waved a grandiose wish that robots should become smarter to compensate for their imperfections instead of chasing perfection with ever more expensive hardware. This was primarily motivated by a period of disillusionment as I wanted to make use of work by robotics research only to find that their published software tend to require hardware orders of magnitude more expensive than what's feasible for my Sawppy.

Since then, I've noticed imperfection is something that's coming up more and more frequently. I had my eyes on the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) for focusing researcher attention towards rugged imperfect environments. They've also provided a very promising looking set of tutorials for working with the ROS-based SubT infrastructure. This is a great resource on my to-do list.

Another interesting potential that I wasn't previously aware of is NASA Space Robotics Phase 2 competition. While phase 1 is a simulation of a humanoid robot on Mars, phase 2 is about simulated rovers on the moon. And just like SubT, there will be challenges with perception making sense of rugged environments and virtual robots trying to navigate their way through. Slippery uneven surfaces, unreliable wheel odometry, all the challenges Sawppy has to deal with in real life.

And good news, at least some of the participants in this challenge are neither big bucks corporations nor secretive "let me publish it first" researchers. One of them, Rud Merriam, is asking questions on ROS Discourse and, even more usefully for me, breaking down the field jargon to language outsiders can understand on his blog. If all goes well, there'll be findings here useful for Sawppy here on earth! This should be fun to watch.