Congratulations to NCRN Distal Fellow François Pomerleau and his team at Norlab (Northern Robotics Laboratory) at Laval University for qualifying for the Darpa SubT Finals Challenge. This coming September, the eight qualifying teams will have to quickly navigate their robot through an unfamiliar underground environment in search of various items. The finals competition also consists of physical challenges as well as virtual ones. Read more here. We reached out to François for comment:  
“The Northern Robotics Laboratory from Laval University, along with their partners from the Czech Technical University (CTU), is now qualified for the final DAPRA SubT challenge. Something different from the last competition is that we have been moved to the funded teams, which means that DARPA is supporting our participation with 1.5 M USD. Our team is currently busy building a new tracked vehicle on time for the "Systems Qualification Tasks", which require us to provide a video to DARPA demonstrating basic autonomy before the 21st of June. Our 3D models can be found here: Marmot (link here) and Husky (link here)."