Desert Robot Race Update, With Video

An anonymous reader writes "Several teams have moved forward with their bid to run the Barstow-Vegas Desert Robot Race (For those not familiar check out http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge ). As of today 55 teams are registered, some of the most interesting are Cal Tech, AI Magic, and the Red Team out of Carnegie Mellon. Also fishing around the Red Team site, there is a pretty nifty video."

Comments

Torrent

[Aliencow]

I am currently downloading the file (it's slowing down every second..) but would anyone be willing to provide a tracker ? I'll make a .torrent and email it/seed it !

race vs challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

from the darpa site's Q&A : "...And they must do these things quickly- overall speed will be the deciding factor and the time limit is designed to push vehicle speeds far beyond current technologies."

this makes it seem like the focus is more on speed that on being able to navigate by oneself. if you're making a race, call it a race, dont call it a challenge, a challenge should have prizes for anyone who can do it. i find this very misleading, anyone have any thoughts on this? how about starting a petition to change the name!

consolevision roxors

Interesting project which can save some lives

[Pvt_Waldo]

One of the huge applications of autonomous vehicles is the removal of landmines. Systems that can scout out, identify, mark, and even remove mines could save the death and maiming of thousands every year.

Our poor earth is littered with millions of land mines left over from past conflicts, and from current ones too.

Don't knock technology like this. It can be used for good too. Even to clean up after the bad.

Re:Interesting project which can save some lives

[Skyshadow]

Or you could have it roll into a network of caves and shoot the people inside without exposing your own guys to risk.

Or you could send it over to an enemy location and transmit a "bomb me" signal to the smart bombs to hit.

Or you could have it crawl in and set fire to a compound where a bunch of religious extremists are held up.

Or you could use it to wait in a ditch for a month until the car of a political leader rolls by and blow it up.

These aren't all necessarily *bad* things -- it's always been reality that we kill each other, sometimes with good reason. But it *is* another step away from the old days when you'd have to risk your own life to kill another person, which IMO makes it a lot easier to do.

Re:Interesting project which can save some lives

[Pvt_Waldo]

Here are some stats from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines website at http:///www.icbl.org and the Clear Landmines website at http://www.clearlandmines.com...

1. Over 35,000 amputees in Camboida alone from landmine injuries
   
2. An estimated 200 million landmines have been manufactured in the last 25 years.
   
3. Each year, 26,000 people are killed or mutilated by landmines of which 8,000 are children.
   
4. Roughly 3 people every hour, 71 per day are injured or killed by landmines
   

The US Military DOES put effort into this kind of thing for landmine detection. It's not just a "killing" technology. Check out http://www.aro.army.mil/arowash/rt/sbir/00PHIII/00 page3.htm for example. Cool "geek friendly" vehicle which can save lives. There are others too. Go to google and search for sbir landmine detection. SBIR grants are a type of grant the US goverment (all branches, not just military) give out every year to small businesses to develop stuff.

Re:Interesting project which can save some lives

[dreadnougat]

Or you could use trained monkeys to do the same thing. This accomplishes two things: 1) Saves lives by clearing out dangerous landmine and other unexploded ordinance. 2) Pisses off PETA Well I don't know about you, but I'm off to kill a cute animal to make into a bag.

CNET had a story on this a while back

[tessaiga]

News.com covered the Grand Challenge a while back in one of their articles. Gives a more viewer-friendly overview of what it's all about than DARPA's site.

i think i will enter

[kdb003]

i will simply program it to set off an emp.
that should spice things up

Red Team Movie Mirror

[jgaynor]

Here, Courtesy of Rutgers.

the mpeg - my first slashdotting

[Mockingbird]

So I get a call from one of my client's ISPs. Some guy named Charles is really alarmed about the massive amount of traffic my sleepy little robot site is generating all of a sudden.

Woohoo, my first Slashdotting!

So naturally the ISP temporarily banished the file. Thanks to everyone who put up mirrors. The file ought to be back where it belongs on 9/10.

Unrelated to the file, these guys at CMU kick ass. Despite all the DARPA downplaying that they don't exepect anyone to even complete the race in the first year, I have tremendous confidence in the Red Team to overachieve. There's a 'success at any cost' vibe coming out of that place that has to be experienced to be believed.

The Red Whittaker hype machine

[Animats]

There's heavy hype out of Red Whittaker's group. He wants to build a machine from the ground up, needs $5 million to do it, and doesn't have it. The fancy video is a fund-raising effort. Note that nothing in that video shows work done for the Grand Challenge, other than some pretty design pictures on a screen.

That red Jeep has nothing to do with the Grand Challenge. That's Navlab 11, the Robotics Institute's latest test vehicle. the Robotics Institute, headed by Charles Thorpe, took a look at the Grand Challenge and decided to pass. He told me "If we entered, we'd have to win", and since he's mostly Government-funded, he'd need another source of funding, which he didn't have. Whittaker, who heads a related but separate operation, the Field Robotics Center, decided to do it on his own.

Whittaker issues a constant stream of trival press releases, like Team Equipped with Laptops and Office Equipment. We have considerable respect for the Robotics Institute at CMU, but this is becoming embarassing.

We take Team Caltech seriously, but not Whittaker's operation.

We will give a presentation on September 24, in EE380 at Stanford, on how we're doing it, and will show our vehicle, which isn't vaporware.

John Nagle
Team Overbot

Re:Interesting project which will kill a lot of fo

[davejenkins]

I would prefer it be very difficult to kill people in general. That way, we'd only do it when we really needed to.

Everyone prefers not to kill (except the murderous bastards). This is a straw-man position, and politically naive.

If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side of history results -- genocide, oppression, etc. Just because it's your side that happens to have the better guns, tech, germs or whatever doesn't mean it's a Good Thing.

No, if you look at history, shitty things happen all the time. There is evidence to the contrary: when forces are balanced, then only the tension builds, not the solution (eventually the tension breaks with very bad results: UK-DE before WWI, US-JP before WWII, UK-FR 100 years war, GR-Persia...). The only time peace occurs is when overwhelming force exists on one side (the benevolent side).

Hell, look at us: We've been way out ahead for, what, 20 years now and already we're invading other nations so our political leaders can distract the masses from economic problems or the fact that they can't stop terrorism (70% of Americans believe Iraq sponsored 9-11, and why not? They're ay-rabs, ain't they?).

How does political trolling like this get modded up to +5?

Anyhow, I understand that we live in reality and that these things happen. I just don't think that most geeks would want to be a part of it if they really thought it over, which is why I said what I did.

"Most geeks" is a spurious term. If you think they are all left-leaning pinkos, you`re wrong. If you think they`re Edvard Teller madmen, you`re wrong. Geeks are all over the spectrum. I would imagine there are some geeks who lost their brothers/fathers/sisters/mothers in 9-11, and would have no qualms in putting the hurt on some goat-farking terrorist camp via remote control.

First problem

[blair1q]

Design a Robot that can drive alone from Barstow to Las Vegas without dying of boredom.