DARPA Challenge

[King Tutankhamun]

"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the first Grand Challenge Project last year, offering a reward of $1 million. This year, the prize money has been doubled, making the competition all the more interesting. We looked at how two teams are working towards the challenge, one in California called Team Cyberrider and one in Germany. The German team is composed of a partnership between Volkswagen and Stanford University. Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun, an internationally accredited expert in artificial intelligence, has assembled an extremely competent development and research team spanning nine different time zones."

Tom's Hardware had a nice article about the robotic cars today and they talked about the DARPA challenge.

Tom's Hardware Article on the DARPA Challenge

"The Grand Challenge pits autonomous vehicles against each other in a race across the Southern California desert. With no driver, these robotic cars use the latest technology in following GPS waypoints and avoiding obstacles. Last year, none of the vehicles finished the race, which proved that the Grand Challenge really was "grand". The winding 150 mile course from Barstow, California to Primm, Nevada knocked out vehicle after vehicle. Most of the vehicles were eliminated just miles of the starting gate, with Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm reaching the farthest distance of 7.4 miles, before clipping a fencepost and then slamming into a three-foot boulder."

The race will be in October of this year in Southern California. Might be something interesting to watch out for.

http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050713/...a_touareg_1.jpg

http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050713/..._last_year2.jpg

[EKen132]

Man, that is my kind of race! (then again, I seem to like just about anything that involves a stopwatch and going faster than someone else)

Make sure to keep us updated Des!

EDIT: Here are some links to get a better picture of it

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ DARPA home site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Wikipedia Entry

[King Tutankhamun]

Thanks for sharing those links.

[King Tutankhamun]

Here's a little update from Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050928_170112.html

and another article on it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050929_145311.html

[Morgan]

I attended AUVSI's 7th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in 2004 which was held at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, California. None of the vehicles worked correctly. The contest seemed to be judged on how long a vehicle worked properly before going completely nuts. The vehicles had to ping the environment to seek out items and move to those items' locations. A Navy SEAL Master Diver was employed to fetch downed vehicles in the extremely large pool that was specifically engineered for use of sonar.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) operates several student competitions for Aerial Robotics, Unmanned Aerial (UAV), Unmanned Ground (UGV), and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV). The technology for vehicular autonomy really isn't there yet, hence these competitions.

[King Tutankhamun]

That's neat.

Here's another update on it from Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20051001_154548.html

[EKen132]

It's pretty much over now.

Stanford won, Carnegie Mellon came in second.

[Dnas]

Ooh... the cars run on Linux.