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DARPA Robot Contest Update
rbrandis writes "DARPA has selected a wide variety of teams, after a series of last minute rule changes and a solid outpouring of anger, the final list of competitors for DARPA's Grand Challenge robot race has been set with 25 teams preparing to try and win a $1 million prize." The anger is exemplified by submissions like this one: Totally_Lost writes "Last spring we flocked to DARPA's Grand Challenge media event in Los Angeles to be told that they wanted everyone's participation in their Robot race this March. They told us that the race would be open to Mom and Pop garage sized participants - and Lied. This fall, nearly 100 teams completed technical paper submissions, with about half to be eliminated from the $1M prize race because they were too small to be 'real' competitors. Well, the rejected robot racing teams got together in Las Vegas last month, and formed the International Robot Racing Federation. This month IRRF is announcing its first competition with $1M in prizes pledged by sponsors, and lesser prizes too, to be offered in a REAL OPEN Challenge next September (providing the race that DARPA failed to deliver)."
They have always been heretofore so up front and honest. This is truly a departure for the military industrial complex.
...beyond their wildest dreams. Not only do they get to have their own competition, which may produce some interesting results, but in addition they get to see another competition that they don't have to pay for, and if anything cool comes of it they can always step in and make an offer on the technology. Plus, a new hobby is born. Sounds like everybody wins here.
From what I've read, it seems they were correct to cull the less-advanced robots from the "herd" - their reasoning is sound.
The presentation of the article, however, seems to be biased in favor of the poor losers; why?
Is there evidence that they were indeed up to snuff but were drubbed anyway?
.to the desire for household robots. Once upon a time, the very thought of a lawn mowing robot filled people with fear. You're not installing a robot lawn mower near my Fifi. (I'm looooking overrrrr, my dead dog Roverrrrrrr...) But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.
Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".
Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.
While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.
I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.
The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.
The linux hacker
Oh, here we go again, repost from the anti-slash karma DB. Originally posted here.
Winning team gets classified as enemy combatants, free vacations in Gauntanamo, ceding all prize money and rights to the design. They only winning move is not to play.
I'm pretty good at smelling a troll, and this one reeks. A quick search of Google shows us that this exact same comment was posted here over 2 months ago. The parent is probably using the Anti-Slash Database Tool to find and search out previous popular posts.
In addition, the parent is a brand-new account, with an already rich posting history of highly-moderated comments, some of which are reposted from older articles.
Also, if you carefully read between the lines, you will notice the posts by this user bear a striking resembelance to those of Sir Haxalot, Pingular, and Steve 'Rim' Jobs, all of which are accounts created by the same user for the purposes of karma-whoring and building up large amounts of karma very quickly in an effor to use this to his advantage while trolling.
Please moderate his post down so this trolling karma-whore will not be able to annoy others and carefully work the system. If you fear the wrath of Meta-mod, you can always rate him as "Overrated" which gives negative karma but does not go to M2.
This has been a public service announcement from a helpful Slashdot user. Posted anonymously to avoid the groupthink.
All sorts of heated tempers and a split to a rival federation. All they need now is a few good rants, some cage matches, and one bot hitting another with a chair or something. It'll be a shoe-in for weekend afternoon TV. w00t!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...because you never can have too many autonomous bomb-delivery devices.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Oh no, I never said I was averse to any such machines or plans, but that they are indeed inevitable, and to believe that these will somehow only be used in the peaceful domain is naive.
A blog like any other.
I'm good friends with a team in the Raleigh/Durham area (Team Insight), and they have been accepted into the grand challenge.
Both myself, along with every member of their team were shocked that DARPA accepted them. They are not on good financial footing at all. For their budget, they need approximately $250,000 (With 4 zeros); however, they know that there are many teams with budgets in excess of 3 and 4 million dollars.
They are looking actively for donations, but have not seen much come to them. They do not expect to be able to compete at all.
However, they were accepted into the challenge. DARPA didn't even require a site inspection of them. They are not affiliated with a major company, university, or anyone in particular, yet they have been accepted. Speaking with one of the members, he was just as confused that they got through as I, and his only explanation was, "We wrote a really good paper."
I'm very impressed that they got this far, but it shows that DARPA is obviously not being very even handed in their acceptance.
DARPA really screwed up this competition, and it's a shame.
That said, if you're rich and want to donate to them, there is a contact form on their website. I'd love to see them go all the way.
I appreciate that the DARPA teams are working in a different ballpark from your average garden shed RW team. But the same basic economic rules apply and looking at the web site the sense of deja vu is increased. If they've got these sponsors then power to them but yet again the www site is a little sparse on the subject. You need more than just a shared sense of rejection to make a business model.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
Don't Plagiarize
You may want to check out RARS, a simulator framework in which you can write programs to run in a simulated auto race against other programs. I haven't messed with RARS in a while, but at the time I was using it, (IIRC) your driver was a C++ class that received a huge struct as a parameter and returned a small struct indicating the direction you wanted to steer and a number indicating gas/brake magnitude.
But what do I know -- my car could barely make it around the track without running into the wall.
You do know mankind has good devices in civilian hands based on research done by military funding, right? The world isn't out to get you. Go back to using the cell phone (thanks to NASA space research) and your GPS (thanks to military research). Next time you fly you can thank military research on jet engines too. The examples here are endless. A more on-topic example would be the robotic arms used in surgery.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The selection process wasn't hard for anyone who had a clue. DARPA was evaluating papers for months, and you could resubmit as many times as you wanted. DARPA warned entrants in the rules that it might take several turnarounds to get a paper through. The people whining about rejection submitted papers at the last minute.
We'll be in Fontana in March.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
A simple, and typical DARPA formula:
1. Announce a nice, big, open competition for ideas, welcome everyone.
2. Get everyone's papers and technical submissions for free.
3. Suddenly, cut the field to 25 well-qualified, well-financed groups. Forget you welcomed everyone.
4. Change the specifications to include some of the more innovative ideas you got, for free, from the small groups you exclude.
5. Run your "competition" touting how fair it is.
6. In the end, award the contract to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockeed. Pay them three times what the small contractor would have charged.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The reason we don't innovate anymore in this country is because true innovation comes from free-thinkers. Darpa and the DOD don't get that anymore, and rely on the same old staid companies to do everything. They'll get a RC vehicle with half the capabilities they originally hoped for at three times the price. Who needs innovation? Just keep feeding the defense-contract monster.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
I am a member of a robotics team. We are building a sub-AI mobile robot very similar to the ones involved in the DARPA Challenge. In fact, we had illusions at some point of competing in a future challenge iff the challenge was not won this year.
We compete in a similar, less-publicized contest. We have three members on our team and had a starting budget of $300. We had our PC104 board and $200 diff. GPS donated, and all of the coding has thus far been done by the three of us. We didn't have any money, and thus we selected an embedded Linux system, which introduced all of us to the world of Linux for the very first time. We work in the lab at all hours of the night, with no help, and no budget. The teams we compete against have corporate backing, 30+ members, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our robot looks very rough and overly simple compared to their corporate-sponsored monsters. Yet, we continually *stomp* them in competition. If that contest were administered like the DARPA one, we would not even be allowed to compete, yet we do compete and win.
Part of this is because our simple solution is: INNOVATION.
Throwing money and lots of members at something does not make it innovative. Advanced Technology doesn't mean that the robot is any good. We compete against a military academy and their robot, despite its "advanced" bells and whistles, does not hold a candle to ours. Heck, we have duct tape holding things onto our bot and it looks pathetic beside the smooth-formed frames of the other robots. But we win because our lack of support and budget forced us to be creative.
And wasn't innovation supposed to be the purpose of this competition?
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Whoever modded Mentifex (Arthur Murray) up as +1 Informitive should be smacked. Arthur's so famous as a crackpot poster that he is in fact the reason why comp.ai is now moderated.
My friend's team made it and they have NO sponsors (or none at the time they got accepted) and are just a few guys working out of someones garage. They got in because they had a good plan and had already made solid progress on their vehicle.
Perhaps this complaining from the small teams is just a case of sour grapes? Perhaps they didn't have a solid plan or any sort of progress and really had no chance to win?
That isn't a flame, I honestly don't know. I just know that there is at least 1 unfunded (well, personnally funded) team that made it in.
-David
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!