Space jellyfish and subterranean robots — September’s best science images

Robot challenge. Eight teams competed in the final of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, a competition run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that put autonomous robots through their paces mapping, navigating and searching underground courses designed to simulate real-life search-and-rescue scenarios. Here, the Human Supervisor for the CSIRO Data61 team — which included members from the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, robotics company Emesent and the Georgia Institute of Technology — receives data from its robots. It’s the supervisor’s job to filter through what the robots see, and submit their guess as to where objects are hidden in the course. The CSIRO Data61 team came second overall in the competition, which was won by CERBERUS, an international team of researchers from several universities and companies.