Carnegie Mellon University’s team of students, faculty, staff and robots placed fourth in a major competition testing how well their robots could navigate an underground course simulating a search-and-rescue mission.

Called Team Explorer, the university’s team traveled this week to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) challenge in Louisville, Ky., which wrapped up Friday. DARPA challenges give teams the chance to tackle problems with real-world implications — in this case, by exploring new ways to use autonomous subterranean robots to aid in search-and-rescue efforts…

The first place team, called CERBERUS, was a collaboration between the University of Nevada, Reno, ETH Zurich, Sierra Nevada Corporation, University of California, Berkeley, Flyability, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Oxford.
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