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

Uh, riiight....

[xintegerx]

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.'

Somehow I have the feeling that 99% of the teams competing will try to figure out inventive, creative ways of using and obfuscating 'external communication or human control' as the first step. :)

Re:Sounds Easy To Me

[Anonymous Coward]

"For example, an extremely large vehicle that simply travels on a straight line between two points by climbing over or breaking through everything in its path (and destroying what cannot support that movement) is not the type of intelligent solution that is sought." - DARPA Site

Obstacle intimidation algorithms not allowed. :/

True

[leerpm]

But the devil ends up being in the details. While it probably would not be too hard to design a vehicle that could do this in a couples day or so, 250 miles in 10 hours means the vehicle would have to be averageing 25 mph. At 25 mph, there is not a whole lot of room for error. You would need a system that could react to environmental issues that came up very quickly such as obstacles, or dead end routes. You would also need to a system that could actually sense/see far enough ahead to steer the vehicle in the correct direction without running into things.

Re:A pittance.

[worst_name_ever]

$1 million doesn't even scratch the surface...

I think it's safe to assume that the winner of the contest (as well as, perhaps, the first few runners-up) will very shortly find himself the recipient of multiple large DoD contracts for further research into autonomous robot tanks^H^H^H^H^Hvehicles.

What's wrong with making processors for missles?

[raehl]

You're just looking at the problem all wrong.

You're not providing the guidance so the missle kills someone, you're providing the guidance so the missle DOESN'T kill all the doctors and patients in the hospital next door to the target.

Re:Before you slam DARPA..

[ocelotbob]

Lemme guess, you'd also like to slam DARPA for builing that blasted ARPAnet? I mean, what good ever came of that?

It should be so easy...

[CreateWindowEx]

Neural nets and "traditional Algorithms" aren't magic bullets, and each subtask you mention "id cars (and their relative speeds)", "find speed limit signs" is a hard problem. While neural nets do have uses in limited cases, they never lived up to all the hype. There's a very big difference between toy problem-domains like "blockworld" or "wumpus world" and the real world, and a lot of very plausible-sounding methods just don't scale to reality.

People have been working on "smart cars" for decades, thowing every technique you mention (and quite a few more) at the problem, and I don't think we're close to having a robot car that could be trusted to drive unsupervised in real traffic...

However, feel free to prove me wrong by winning the contest!