Teach A Robot To Drive, Win A Million Bucks

An Anonymous Reader writes "DARPA has released the details of a 'Grand Challenge,' with a $1 million prize. The challenge is to build an autonomous vehicle which can 'navigate on its own over a 250-mile desert course in less than 10 hours.' from L.A. to Vegas, 'without external communication or human control.' The contest is to be conducted in March 2004, and is open to all comers. Can we get at least one entry to represent slashdot?" We've mentioned this contest a few times before: any intended entrants out there want to disclose your secret plans?

Comments

Perhaps not that hard?

[ryants]

This is from Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig, published 1995:

ALVINN (Autonomous Land Vehicle In a Neural Network) ... is a neural network that has performed quite well in a domain where other approaches have failed. It learns to steer a vehicle along a single lane on a highway by observing the performance of a human driver. ... The results of the traning are impressive. ALVINN has driven at speeds up to 70 mph for distances up to 90 miles on public highways near Pittsburgh. It has also drive at normal speeds on single lane dirt roads, paved bike paths, and tow lane suburban streets.

The only problem is the training... the system is unable to drive on roads that it doesn't have training data for. I glanced quickly at the DARPA rules and didn't see anything that would invalidate a "build a similar course and train on it" approach. So take ALVINN, build lots of courses that sound like the sort that DARPA is planning, and train, train, train!

References:

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
• ALVINN

Even Faster Than That

[sacdelta]

From the rules:

2.19.3 Maximum Finishing Time

In order to qualify for the Grand Challenge cash award, the maximum corrected finishing time of the winning team must be less than six hours. Additionally, to ensure safe operation during daylight hours only, all vehicles must be removed from the route ten hours after their departure.

If you want the money you have to do it in 6 hours. This is just over 40 mph. But some of the route is paved which should allow for higher speeds for parts of the course.

The rules also state that the route will be navigable/avoidable by a standard 4x4 pickup (HINT HINT).

Having driven out in the desert, even on the dirt roads, most of it can be driven at 60+ mph. You just have to be ready for the parts that can't be driven faster than 5 mph.

Re:Even Faster Than That

[sacdelta]

2.24 Challenge Area

The Challenge area includes the Departure Area, Departure Line, Challenge Route, Checkpoint Area, Arrival Line, Arrival Area, and any other area that has been assigned to DARPA for the purpose of conducting this Challenge. The specific boundaries of the Challenge area will be briefed to the Participants at a pre-Challenge brief shortly prior to the Challenge.

It sounds like they give the details of the route only a short time before the actual race (maybe a couple of days? hours?) so it would probably be a good idea to have built-in GPS to assign the waypoints quickly, easily and accurately.

The point of the exercise is to see how well the robot car can deal with "unknown" conditions, so I would wager that pre-driving would be discouraged.

In fact:

Vehicles that cannot demonstrate intelligent _autonomous_ behavior will not be accepted as Participants.

So a marker based vehicle would be right out.

Re:Uh, riiight....

[effer]

From the FAQ...

Q11. Can I use differential global positioning system (GPS)?

A11. The challenge vehicle is free to use publicly available signals. This includes differential GPS receivers in towns or counties along the way. A team may establish a private differential GPS receiver, as long as it is fully autonomous, at a checkpoint.