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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.
If each team starts at a random (or sensibly positioned) part of the course, and has to navigate to a central point or points the vehicles would need to navigate similar but not identical terrain, and also have to deal with traffic that is coming at it from many directions rather than a convoy type traffic scenario with everyone starting from the same place.
Alternately, if the weather conditions in this part of the world are stable enough it should be possible to run the course over several weeks. The only problems that occur to me would be that evidence of previous vehicles would mean that the latter teams would have tracks as markers as to where others went. If the area is reasonably windy, or has lots of rain, these could be washed away but that is sheer speculation. Just my $0.02 worth
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!
Just admitting that they underestimated the interest in this competition, and change it to make the rules harder? I doubt that the current requirements include everything that they would like an autonomous vehicle to accomplish.
I like the "tournament" ideas discussed so far, as DARPA should really test ALL the submissions. Find the best technology now, and further development WILL bring the cost down in the long run. Simply saying 'Oh, but this one is too expensive' has too much potential to eliminate superior technology.
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
While Cheapness is important, I dont think that should be a limit, since it can create a lot of discussion and manipulation of the cost.
The best is if they try to take in as many contestants as possible.
If they want to use an economical limit to reduce the number of contestants they should decide a maxcost or something such.
We already have "car-sharing" programs, and this could take it a step farther.
Instead of driving the car to work and leaving it in a parking lot all day, the car could spend the day running errands for other people. Not everyone would need to buy a car and those who do could chose to lease them into this system.
Sure, Americans like the freedom of driving down the road wherever and whenever they want. We also don't like being pressed in with a bunch of other people. Given a choice between an hour alone in our cars or an hour stuffed in a train or bus, most Americans will choose the car.
In my personal case, the mass-transit option takes more than an hour to get to and from work. I can make the drive in 15 minutes. Working an hourly job, the hour of commuting time saved more than pays for my parking costs.
On top of that, your car can still fail, the electronic fuel injection could go screwy and you'd lose power, causing an accident. Heck, in event of a problem, the car could broadcast an alert via some redundant system that goes "HEY! I broke, and I'm right here! don't hit me!" If you built all the cars to be interoperable, you could do all sorts of nifty things, scheduling and traffic management to alleive congestion.
All I'm really trying to say, is that I'd trust windows more than some of the drivers on the road, and these would likely be very stable embedded systems, like the kind that run assembly lines, or your car, every day without a hitch.
Douglas P. Price
The system was simple. In pre-qualifying, competitors had to exceed some pre-set minimum standard. If you didn't make it, you didn't get into the regular qualifying session. The reason for calling it pre-qualifying is that, for the bulk of the season, it only applied to the slowest N driver/team pairs.
Qualifying then required all surviving competitors to get within N seconds of the fastest car. Anyone slower was disqualified.
Similar standards are used in the Olympics, where there are minimum standards set to even be able to get there, and (as there are more countries than track space) you then have to meet additional standards to actually start.
It seems that this would be the way for DARPA to go. Now, space and marshalling will place certain limits on how they can do this. You can't do your routine pre-qualifying, if there's nobody you can have marshalling the event, and nowhere to hold it.
Static testing would therefore seem a viable alternative. Put up a prefab shop, where you can statically test the autonomous vehicles. If certain standards aren't met, the vehicle is DNQed. Yeah, it's rough, as this wasn't the original spec, but they've gotta do something and this would work better than drawing lots.
Now, you're still likely to have more than 20 meet the minimum, unless the minimum is so high that you risk eliminating too many. The answer here would seem to be to have some kind of short sprint area. That shouldn't be too bad, now the numbers are down. First 20 across the line are the entrants.
Again, this is rough, but DARPA are badly outnumbered and they don't have a choice but to cut the numbers somehow. The only fair way is to have "mini contests" that are sufficiently limited in space/time that they can manage it with the resources they have.
And, again, competitors may bitch about being DNQed with the above, because it wasn't the original contest, but they'd bitch a hell of a lot more (and with far greater cause) if it came down to drawing straws.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)