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DARPA's Autonomous Vehicle Challenge Too Popular?
Tim writes "Mobilerobotics.org has an editorial accompanying a copy of a letter to one of the teams entering the DARPA Grand Challenge 1 million dollar autonomous vehicle race, in which DARPA admits to underestimating the number of teams that can actually partipate in the actual race. They figure they've only got room for 20 teams, and more than 100 have applied. The writer of the editorial argues that if more than 20 teams can qualify safely and technically, DARPA should have to chose the 20 cheapest financed teams. What should DARPA do to sort out these problems?" CNET News has more on the high turn-out, while DARPA ponders its next step.
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Why is this such a big deal?
The course.
Just the number of local jurisdictions that this race will pass through makes the logical approach undoable because of the logistical requirements.
I'm involved a bit in ultramarathon cycling and they go through the same problems all the time. State Police, County Sheriff, City Police, everyone with a badge and permit application form gets in on the act and you have to coordinate them all.
One numnut in the middle of the course who'll only let you do it on Tuesday, but only if the moon is full, fucks the whole deal if everyone else will only allow it on Wednsday, but only if the moon is new.
KFG
The next big gripe is about the "DARPA site visit". DARPA plans to send some people out to visit each team in December and check on their progress. A few people are complaining loudly about this, but anybody with something to show shouldn't have a problem with it. It's basically a vaporware filter.
Finally, DARPA has decided to use the preliminary testing at the California Motor Speedway in Fontana to cut the number of entries down to 20. I will be surprised if twenty teams field something that crosses the starting line in Fontana, let alone finishes the trial course.
I don't see a problem here.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
(Incidentally, while we have most of the people we need, we could use an additional electronics tech and a QNX sysadmin. "No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize.")
This competition is incredibly difficult. Travellling 250 miles in 10 hours over desert terrain, on a course which in some places is intentionally too narrow for GPS navigation, is almost certainly beyond the limits of current robotic technology. Because of the slow speeds necessary on portions of the course, the robot must drive at over 60 MPH much of the time! It will undoubtedly be several years before any team passes the test (unless they loosen the rules).
Although there are 100+ teams registered (see the team list here), that doesn't mean much. There was no entry fee to apply! At this point all the teams have to have done is supply a technical paper with their ideas for how their robot could work. There's a huge difference between doing that and actually producing a multi hundred thousand dollar vehicle.
Undoubtedly, only a small fraction of these teams will have the budgets and resources to show up with a vehicle on March 13. I doubt there will be more than 10. And none of them will meet the standards necessary to win the contest. But most of them will be back next year, with a few new entrants, and after enough years of experience they will hopefully succeed.
But for now, this is all a mountain in a molehill. People are making a tempest out of a teapot. DARPA simply failed to explicitly include a phase to weed out those contestants who won't have a vehicle. Now they are fixing that. I doubt very much that the numbers will be an issue at all.
Even the CMU team is CMU's second string. The Robotics Institute decided to pass on the Grand Challenge. The group entering is from the Field Robotics Center, which is Red Whittaker's old teleoperator-building operation. They're not the autonomous robot people from CMU. They didn't raise the $5 million they said they were going to raise, either. Basically, the CMU people are hanging an Applanix GPS/INS system and a Reigl laser rangefinder on an old HUMMV, which is reasonable enough. Their main advantage is a big body count - they claim to have over 40 undergrads working on the thing.
The Caltech entry is really a bunch of undergrads with a '95 Chevy Blazer and an adviser from JPL. They're very dependent on cameras, probably too dependent given the state of the art in that area.
Nobody that I know of is doing this with all full-time paid staff.