February

Dear Blog.

This whole month was dedicated to the Darpa SubT Challenge: our team (Cerberus) is composed by different entities from all around the world so you can image how hard is to organize meetings between Zurich, Reno, Oxford and Berkeley.

Two weeks to go

Two weeks before moving to Seattle, the place where the competition took place, our team mates from Zurich landed in Reno for a full-time integration phase. And guess what? The head of the Zurich team is Italian! (yes, capital I).

I missed Europe so much and spending a so intense amount of time with europeans I think made me even more malinchonic (I know, I am a sentimental person!).

I am not allowed to describe in details how all our algorithms work, but the logic is to use both ground, legged and flying robots to exend as much as possible the total explored space.

I was so lucky I could even calibrate the VI system on Anymal! That was so much fun. Aaaaah I love robots!!

Trip to lake Tahoe

I was here already in mid September, but this is such an amazing place I think one can never get bored of it. And the day was incredible too.

Days in Satsop

Before getting there, let me say that we stayed in Aberdeen, WA! What? You don't know? It's the city where Kurt Cobain was born! And I can finally understand why he was so depressed, poor boy...

Anyway the competition took place in an abandoned nuclear power plant (https://clui.org/ludb/site/satsop-nuclear-plants) between Elma and Montesano, and it was super cold the whole time inside.

And guess what? we got 5th place! Of course Nasa and Jpl won, they came out with two spot mini from Boston Dynamics cmooon! Easy win there

But overall the experience was great: I got the chance to know better my lab mates (spending 24h for 2 weeks together is kinda some amount of time), I learned so much about many different systems never seen before, different strategies, many many new friends.

That's all foks!

Peace :)