The competitive event will be held in South Australia in November this year, with close to US$2 million available in total prize money for the competing Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotics International Challenge (MAGIC) teams.
A panel of Australian and US defence scientists will evaluate the robot prototypes developed by the 12 shortlisted teams in Australia, USA, Canada, Turkey and Japan.
The 12 teams were narrowed down from 23 entries originally received for the competition.
The Technical Assessment Panel will visit each of the 12 teams over the next few weeks for an intensive evaluation of their concept demonstrators which will result in a list of five to seven finalists to be announced towards the end of July, giving the selected teams four months to refine and continue development of their concepts.
Each of the finalists will receive further research grants of US$50,000 to complete their projects.
The four Australian teams include the University of New South Wales, MAGICIAN (a collaboration between the University of Western Australia, Flinders University, Edith Cowan University, Thales Australia and ILLIARC Pty Ltd), Sydney company Strategic Engineering in association with the University of Adelaide, and Melbourne company Numinance in association with La Trobe University.
The international teams include Northern Hunters (Canada), Chiba University (Japan), Cappadocia (Turkey), Reconnaissance and Autonomy for Small Robots Team (US), Cornell University (US), University of Michigan, Team VACAS (Virginia Tech, US) and the University of Pennsylvania (US).