Preparing for the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge

Little Hamster writes "Post-gazette.com has an interesting article on the DARPA funded 200-mile autonomous vehicle race across the California-Nevada desert. They interviewed teams from two of the early favourites, Carnegie Mellon University and the California Institute of Technology. The teams talked about challenges on driving at high speed over a combination of roads, rough terrain and brush-covered desert, where the robot would need to consider how fast it can make a turn, the possibility of spinning tires and the potential to become airborne when hitting bumps."

Comments

Male or Female

[rf0]

You can just see it now can't you. The losers are going to be saying "Well we programmed the robots with female personality. Its not our fault that in 200 miles of flat desert it crashed into the only gate post on the entire course"

Rus

Not as good as it sounds...The Drawback

[Geekbot]

Sure, robot cars sound cool, like KITT, and even KARR was cool in his own way. But technology like this could elimate all those taxi driver jobs. Yeah, and you know what that means. All those guys will start taking over our programming jobs here too.

Re:Who Do You Want to Shoot Today?

[Scrameustache]

No one wants to make nuclear war 'practical.'

I'm sorry, but a lot of medal-wearing people do.

killing a lot of people typically doesn't help win wars.

Hiroshima, Nagazaki.

This isn't the middle ages where you can hope to wipe out an entire society in a single war.

Nah, you have to keep at it nowadays. Like, Have one president invade a country, then leave, let an embargo weaken that country, then have the son invade it again...

Dude, seriously, war is about killing people. Always has been, always will be. So maybe you can be efficient at it and only kill enough to convince the rest that it is in their best interest to give up, surrender, submit and cooperate, but the killing is always a big part of it all.