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Still More on the DARPA Grand Challenge
The SF Chronicle has an in-depth story on the DARPA Grand Challenge, with emphasis on the several teams from the San Francisco area. The three teams covered are using a pickup truck, a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, and a self-balancing motorcycle...
So sad... Maybe you could setup a "userless firstpost!" ... But who'd fund it?
Which of these three doesn't belong?
a pickup truck,
a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle,
and a self-balancing motorcycle
Esoteric reference.
no VW van?
*insert joke about how blue screen of death will be literal here*
Do you think I could enter with a beat up buick and a brick on the accelerator?
01100010 01101001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101
Err - offtopic?! (It's meant to be funny)
(Hmm, "userless modding" maybe?)
Ahh well. As for the driverless car/truck/bike - this sounds quite cool, what makes this harder than pilotless planes? (We already have those, the drone things... I am missing something?)
so if that pickup truck had come from texas instead of SF would it have it's own computer controlled fully autonomous gun turret too?
Which one will be least elaborite. I mean, yes you need some complexity, but the less things that can go wrong the better. I like the sound of a self balancing motorcycle myself, but I bet the simplest will have a better chance at winning.
http://www.beyourowneviloverlord.tk
http://www.frozenchickenthrowing.tk
http://www.killercamel.tk
I wonder how much do NASA and DARPA collaborate. Much of the technology used to create the mars rovers seems like they would be useful for this challenge.
From the article: "The biggest hurdle has been making vehicles see obstacles and react to them"
The mars rovers use a pair of cameras to build a 3d model when it decides its path. Put this system into a 4x4, give it a small cluster for computation, and it should work well enough to make it across the desert, I would think.
Drones don't have to face any obstacles, they can fly almost anywhere. The desert landscape, on the other hand, is more complicated.
John Negle aka Animats is the Slashdot's most prolific poster.
Leave the vechicle unlocked in a bad part of Barstow with the keys, a pile of Vegas casino chips and case of booze in the car.
If no one watches the car, I predict at least 50% chance that it with disappear from Barstow and reappear in Vegas. (Or in a ditch on the way there.)
Cannonball run. For robots. Cool.
from the article and a pic of of Animats!!!!
EEPD Profive 700 Mhz Pentium III PC -104 onboard computer running Real Time Linux
http://robots.mit.edu/projects/darpa/ (with videos)
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
From the article:
DARPA won't disclose the exact route of the Grand Challenge until two hours before the race March 13; it has promised a rigorous route that will include rocks, gullies and streams.
Some of the world's best dirtbike riders wouldn't be able to easily cross stuff your average Land Rover or Land Cruiser would laugh at. I think the team with [what looks like] the 6-wheeled ATV stands the best chance, at least from a vehicle-choice perspective. Those things are amazing in terms of what they can cross- some of them even float and can ford -rivers- using the tires as paddlewheels.
Description of the pickup truck entry:Two tons of steel rolled forward and made a jerky left out of a parking lot in Morgan Hill. It gained speed and settled into a lane. It followed a curve to an intersection. It stopped. Then it turned right and continued down the road.
Probably stands a better chance(and has better fuel economy than the 6-wheeler- though a MUCH higher center of gravity), but taking a trip through suburbia hardly qualifies as suitable testing grounds for what DARPA has described...and depending on the truck, it might not stand up to the abuse. A jeep(or, a Land Cruiser, or a Land Rover) would have been a much better idea than a pickup truck, which really isn't designed for off-roading.
Even the guys who do insane things with their jeeps and whatnot come fully equipped. Air suspensions. Winches. Huge tanks of air or compressors to re-seat the giant tires(did I mention giant tires? :-)
I can also think of a lot better things to spend money on than that giant LCD display they put in the truck's passenger side; that thing has got to be what, 21"? The money would have been much better spent on the truck itself. It's all fun and games until that rock takes out your transfer case and your truck's transmission rips itself to pieces.
Please help metamoderate.
I still can't believe my "joke" got a modded as "offtopic".
Anyway, is navigating a desert so hard? You can use GPS to plot position, and if you're on the ground you can't hit it! There aren't any significant drops that can't be detected by satalite are there? (I know the dunes move, but a significantly large rover isn't going to have a problem there is it?)
Sure you the device was to be deployed in a non-desert setting things would be harder.
The article mentions things like your rental car showing up from the airport all by itself, which I admit would be quite cool. It also makes me wonder about the first collision between two autonomous vehicles on a public highway. Would the programmers get the tickets? Lots more interesting questions to be answered when these things start selling...
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
do they have a plan in case these driver-less vehicles are roaming outside the designated path and start running people over?
I just read an article in Scientific American about this. I'm not into robotics myself, but I'm curious: how much of the difficulty is due to the time it takes to process the input data (from cameras, lasers, etc.)? how much is from the necessary ruggedness of the components? how much difficulty comes from lack of funding for and access to top-of-the-line components? I'm also curious to see what DARPA plans to do with the winning vehicle, if there is a winner. Will they pay for, and then take, any vehicle that is innovative (for example, the motorcycle that can stand on its own)?. Kudos to DARPA for their clever method of conducting research--instead of tying funds up in someone's brainchild, they are allowing a lot of different ideas to proliferate.
War does not determine who is right, war determines who is left.
It's one thing when a soldier dies because his equipment fails, but I predict that when the first pedestrian gets run over by one of the "robotic" cars the company that makes them will get sued up the wazoo and rightfully taken to the cleaners. Computers should not be everywhere.
...don't belong. What a lineup!
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
I dunno... I think we do a pretty good job of that ourselves. Maybe the robots could learn a thing or two.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
As a lover of the desert and card carrying member of Earth First, I thought I'd point out another contest that happens to be occurring on the same day. Its called "Bag the Unmanned Vehicle". Contestants compete to disable unmanned vehicles trashing desert flora and fauna for fun and prizes.
=-+
Just because DARPA is collaborating with NASA, don't get your hopes up if you're thinking about some 'geekcool' super-Star-Trek-beam-me-up-scotty rocket their buddy. DARPA is strictly defense, and anything they can get to the benefit of a defense project is worth gold.
If DARPA is doing something with NASA, it will likely use this for the killing fields nothing more nothing less.MoFscker
The difficulty with autonomous land vehicles is using sensor data to figure out what the environment is like, and using that information to plan what to do next. Both are AI problems, not hardware problems (though, certainly, clever sensor hardware and lots of computer power helps).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Its been done a long time ago but still has soo much to be desired to do it effectivly... Basically you still need a human operator for the equipment your pulling to keep it effecient.. and since your allready in there.. might as well drive to keep effeciency up as high as you can get...
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
training wheels anyone?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
Of course the simple solution would be to give a monkey a quad bike. But don't give him a full-blown road vehicle, or he will turn it into a V8 intercepter and conquer the post-apocolyptic wasteland...
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Vehicles must cross 200 miles of rugged terrain between Barstow and Las Vegas
Sweet Jesus! That's bat country. I suppose the poor bastards will figure that out soon enough.
?
Automobiles should be restricted to 4 mph, and preceded by a man carrying a red flag (an presumably singing the Internationale for good measure).
Machines such as the Spinning Jenny will destroy our way of life.
I salute you, Ned Ludd, for your foresight and insight into the human condition.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
200 miles in 10 hours equals an average of 20mph.
A blog about stuff.
thanks to all of the people helping DARPA plan to kill people better, faster, cheaper!
-1 Troll
I wish the article said how they were making the pickup be autonomous. Are they running linux and wrote some sort of hazard avoidance program, etc?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
I've honestly wondered about something like this with the advent of self-parking cars. Who is liable if/when one of these cars injures a pedestrian/other car?
True believers seek redemption from the sin of death.
The technology involved might seem interesting to us, but the USE that it will be put to will be killing innocent people who live in energy-rich regions of the world that don't agree to hand over their natural resources to the US on US terms, aka 'terrorists'.
Something I wondered about the scenario of the car taking off in the suburban street.
How does i know which side of the road to drive on?
How do you tell it that half of it's obstacle-free passage is actually not allowed to be driven on because that's for traffic going in the other direction ?
But it strikes me as kinda odd that you are using the freakin INTERNET (a DARPA funded creation) to post your naive views....
Hmmm..smell that? It's called irony
I'd like to see you ford a 6 foot deep riverbed, at 20mph. I'd like to see you scale a 45 degree rock face.
Point is, there are conditions suited for the various vehicles, and I don't think the darpa trail is going to be set up for motorcycles/dirt bikes. I also think finding a path is a lot easier for a truck or ATV than it is for a motorcycle; the cyclist has to worry about getting his front tire trapped; with tires almost twice the size and diameter, a truck doesn't, even if it doesn't have special tires.
I also find it rather hard to believe they've come up with a system that can balance a motorcycle on slippery trails- riders can stop, put out a foot, whatever- this thing can't..and if it falls over, it's -screwed-. I think you're very right about rider skill. I don't see how the thing could do even half the stuff I've seen riders do, and a ton of it falls well outside of "ride the bike sitting down". Wheelies and jumps, etc...
Please help metamoderate.
Of course they know, it was on the rules of entry.
Anyway, sure accidents happen, but the sole purpose of these machines aren't to kill civilians. So you have a picture of a dismembered child, do you have any story saying "The army tested it's new X10 remote planes today by blowing the limbs off of small children"? Maybe the US army didn't even do that (well they might have, I mean it's not like it never happens) it's just some random picture with nothing describing what happened. When civilians are killed it's mainly human error, when you have a machine go into a town to find a target and destroy (and this probably won't happen for a LOOOOOOONG time) it'd be able to sort through civilians and the actual target much better than a human. These machines would be able to REDUCE the number of civilian casualties not increase.
As per usual, the AC forgets to mention that said child immediately prior to the attack was shooting down coalition soldiers with an automatic rifle.
You may think that all child victims of war are innocent, but in some parts of the world even the children (well, some of them) are rabid fanatics.
Anyway, compare the number of innocent victims from robot warriors versus those from human warriors.
Personally I'll take the robot warriors any day - because eventually we'll get the programming right. A robot isn't going to go postal on a crowd of civilians because one of them threw a rock and killed his buddy.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Technological advances in US's Weapons of Mass Destruction has so far not decreased the casualty rate, but increased it.
Look at the statistics from Iraq. They basically had no army worth fighting. They were crippled by 10 years of UN sactions. They were a few small steps away from being armed with rocks and sling-shots.
The US army was far superior technologically. But 10,000 civilians died, and millions more are going to die because of Depleted Uranium poisoning.
Pumping yet more money into the US military will certainly not save any lives.
> a few small steps away from being armed with
> rocks and sling-shots.
First time I hear a T72 being described as a rock. And yes, these did see action, in case you missed it (if with little success, except against the Bradleys).
> But 10,000 civilians died
For comparison's sake, what are the civilian death figures for other hostile takeovers of countries with a population of about 20 million (say the non-Vichy part of France in World War II)?
> millions more are going to die because of
> Depleted Uranium poisoning.
Depleted uranium is chemically about as poisonous as most other heavy metals that would be used for ordnance (the metal of choice for amunition was lead before DU came along, and we all know how safe lead is).
But nice try to stir up fears by mentioning "uranium" How about pointing to a scientific study of DU toxicity (some have been done, by opponents of DU, even, and found what I have said above) instead of pointing to propaganda?
Sadly, we (Team Overbot) aren't going to be ready in time. We lost five members in January. Two got better jobs, and two were Stanford students who needed to get their grades back up. This left us with too few people to finish in time. We have all the hardware, and most of the software, Most of it is working, but it hasn't been integrated and tested. We'll finish the vehicle, and we'll have some public demos at some point, even if we're not at the Grand Challenge.
It's up to DARPA whether anyone wins this year. They're going to provide 5000 GPS waypoints, and if you can drive the route described by connecting the dots, somebody will probably win. If the vehicle has to find its own gully crossing, it's unlikely that anyone will win, unless somebody figured out, by hand, in advance, where the crossing is. It's all up to DARPA. As one of the DARPA people put it, "This is turning into a breadcrumb following exercise". If somebody wins by connecting the dots, this whole thing was a waste of time.
Several teams are using aerial photographs and manual planning. The general route leaked weeks ago, and it's since been oveflown by Airborne 1 in San Diego. High-resolution photos and depth maps from LIDAR scans have been obtained. Still, you won't see a fence in those depth maps. The emphasis on preplanning surprised us. The whole point of the Grand Challenge was originally that preplanning was made impossible by the large area to be covered and the release of the waypoints only two hours before the race. That all changed when the route leaked.
Nobody seems to be deploying anything new in the sensor area. Everybody with a laser rangefinder that we know of is using an off-the-shelf line scanner. Nobody has a true 3D scanner, although several teams have line scanners on tilt heads. It's quite possible to build a true 3D LIDAR depth measurement system. But it's hard to make money doing it, as the five companies that exited the field learned the hard way.
We hear talk of new vision algorithms, but no details yet. Stereo vision doesn't work well on dirt or sand; there aren't enough edges for the stereo algorithms to register the images properly. Optical flow doesn't work well for the same reason. If somebody can do good stereo from motion in this demanding environment, that will be an achievement.
Still, the Grand Challenge has done quite a bit to get autonomous vehicle work moving again. Just getting CMU off the dime (DARPA's real intent, we hear) was worth the whole effort.
If DARPA does this every year for the next decade, with a tougher course every time somebody wins, we will have battlefield robotics that works within ten years.
We will grease the treads of our robots with the bodies of their infidel children. Their blood will run in rivers as our robot armies crush the life out of our enemies. And when our armies have passed and the few survivors emerge from their holes, they will know what it means to challenge America.
The Turing Test for 2004 goes like this... "Can you distinguish an autonomous computer controlled vehicle from some old lady driving to Vegas?"
I see a picture of a child missing a limb. Though emotionally charged, there's very little useful information.
The parent poster may be making an honest claim, and he may not. I note it was posted by an Anonymous Coward, which doesn't help. Could have been an unmanned vehicle that did it. Could have been a landmine, too. Might have been a US vehicle, might have been Chinese. Was this a grisly industrial accident? Horrifying though the thought may be--was the child armed?
Context, please? It seems to be an awfully tenuous link to autonomous vehicles...
All we have here is a picture that suggests that military conflicts are bloody, grisly, destructive things, with wretched consequences. Well, duh. We knew that.
Thought experiment: Can the use of unmanned vehicles reduce this type of civilian casualty? Expendible vehicles might be less likely to be used to shoot innocent civilians, because they're not going to be frightened, or have an itchy trigger finger. Just a thought.
One possible alternate perspective: this sort of technology will further the perspective that war is a sort of video game--one that can be entered into more readily if there are no (ahem) friendly lives at risk. Just a thought.
~Idarubicin
No, but the new, improved Marines version will ;)
Anyway - all terrorists drive Toyota Hi-lux pickups. Let's just ban them, and life will be simple.
it will save plenty of lives... more US lives. Autonomous cars, better weapons of masss destruction, means less troops to send, but still blowing just as many of them up.
,lol
save more [US] lives
only recently have we been getting studies 'proving' the toxicity of agent orange. The traditional defense that our government had used to protect itself from lawsuits from the innocent civilians in South Vietnam and vets: "What poison?". So the government has blocked/failed to fund research for many years. People are rightly terrified of us military applications of technology because the us military A) frequently fights the weak as opposed to the evil for political or economic gain (thereby supporting the military industrial-complex) B) has a history of human rights crimes and supporting human rights abusers. And technology makes this more easy and harder to defend against. It's not propoganda...read the bland-old-bbc...as a less personal start for most US citizens, u might want to read the timeline about Israel and the Palestinians. What you read in the news gives a very biased pro-Israel perspective imho. Not surprising since we invest heavily in the Israeli military.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
... like, 30 ft/day, or something? The DARPA thing needs to move 20 mph on average through the rocky desert road (ever driven a Jeep at 20+ mph off-road? not pleasant, huh? ;-) ). I bet that 3D vision algorithms used in NASA rover are pretty old and conservative compared to what can be run on even the simplest laptop likely to be built into that truck.
Paul B.
In heaven:
The Italians are the lovers
The Swiss run the hotels
The Germans are the mechanics
The British are the police
The French are the cooks.
In Hell:
The French run the hotels
The British are the cooks
The Italians are the mechanics
The Swiss are the lovers
The Germans are the police.
I was the lead engineer of the Grand Challenge team 'R Junk Works'. Our paper was submitted and approved by DARPA for the Grand Challenge. They then put us in the 'Partially Acceptable' category just after approval. This was no big deal for us as we already had our prototype vehicle built and were testing it in October of 2003 before we submitted our Technical Paper. Their 'Site Visit' seemed like just another hoop to jump through before being in the race. There are only three people on our team, and we all have worked in one form or another for the 'Lockheed Martin Skunk Works', so our little group we called the spin offs - or the 'R Junk Works'. We are also located in Palmdale California. In retrospect, perhaps it was our team name that gave DARPA hesitation. Heaven forbid that only three guys in a garage in Palmdale with a name like ours win their Grand Challenge! Anyway, the four DARPA site visitors/inspectors arrived at my garage on the 5th of December to inspect our progress. They road around in our test vehicle that had: Integrated DGPS, LN200INU and V4L2 Vision systems running under LINUX Fedora Core 1.0 all installed and functional in my personal 1998 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. They let it slip that this was a 'first for them' to be riding around in one of the contestants vehicles. They road around in the drivers seat around the desert next to my house here in Palmdale along a pre programmed course that took them down dirt desert roads and washes here in the Mojave Desert - only a few mile away from where they are going to have the actual race. Members of this inspection team jump in front of our vehicle as it was traversing the pre programmed course and watched how it avoided them by driving around them and continuing down the course. They watched with amazement as our vehicle raced along in excess of 35 mph across the rutty Mojave Desert roads. Almost everything worked perfectly for the demo except our main vision system camera had been damaged the day before and we were using our backup camera that was having intermittent problems, but did not take away from the totality of the demo. It was probably one of the best demos I have ever given in my entire professional life. If I could summarize their attitude of the demonstration, it would be that they were amazed, enthused and excited over our participation in the Grand Challenge. They also let it somewhat slip that we were the farthest along team that they had seen as yet! I tend to think that the inspection team was 'On our side' as possible contestants. After the demo, we assumed that it was inevitable that we would be selected for one of the remaining six contestant slots left. This was far from the case. They called us on December 17th (my birthday) and told us that we were not selected to participate. One of the inspection team members said: 'After a much heated discussion amongst the DARPA Program Director and our inspection team, I have been told to tell you that you were not selected to participate in the Grand Challenge.' The transparent reason they gave us was that our team did not, as yet, have an actual 'race vehicle'. A very trivial problem for us when it comes right down to it. This was by their very own undoing, as once our vehicle sponsors got wind that we were not in the 'Totally Acceptable' list; they backed out and were waiting for our team to be on that list before donating our actual race vehicle. We even supplied statements of sponsorship from that sponsor = they obviously did not read them = OR = perhaps there was another incentive. After talking to a guy called 'Dan' who is the editor of a national magazine and good friend of mine, he also went to the 'Kick Off' for the Grand Challenge that DARPA had in LA last year. He was able to 'Liquor Up' one of the DARPA legal reps, and SHE intimated that the reason they were holding the Grand Challenge was to put the fear of god into their current contractor and show that they could go else ware for technical projects. She also said that it had already achieved this goal and that even if the
Even if the article hadn't called it 'rugged terrain', the desert is much more complex than just dunes. There's holes, rock outcroppingss, fences, heavy brush, steep inclines, stream beds, etc.. You can get somewhat of an idea by browsing around this Google image search.
I do not want to be stuck behind an autonomous car with its blinker on for 200 miles. The programmer that gets that wrong needs to be tied to the bumper of that vehicle!
Work and Fun Graduation
How is this insightful? The link is to a picture with no context, and there is no information in the post at all. Is the author suggesting these autonomous vehicles will be used to lay land mines in the third world? If so, I'd like to point out the U.S. Military no longer uses anti-infantry land mines, and even if they did, they will lay them fancy unmanned truck or not. Also considering we try to recover them when they have served their purpose, an unmanned vehicle would probably be better at pinpointing the exact location it buried a mine in the first place. And finally, what third world country did we put mines in? Ussually we wind up trying to clean them up from someone else's conflict. Unless the author is suggesting the army is spending all this money to develop trucks for the express pupose of removing 3rd world children's limbs, in which case I would point out the manned version would probably cost less.
This page looks particularly interesting:
So, only driving is allowed in this contest, no hovering or flying?
... if DARPA would have really set a challange it would have been soo much more interesting. Why dont they set it to be "build a vehicle to invade Mars." (competing so far are: a baloon, a couple of rovers and a one armed DOA esa beagle)
It would be soo much easier just to buy an old Apache (keep the hellfires attached... to have extra competative advantage) and fly over the course that was set out.
Probably more usefull too, once el quada acquire these robocars (or bikes) it would be handy to have something that can fly to take out the hordes of robocars coming to invade the us...
oh... and this would be old technology, since we learned to fly drones way back in previous century.
Now, why does DARPA want in on these new technologies? So they can make robots that will eventually replace human soldiors, and they will get the technology by stealing it from us. Nice.
thisnukes4u.net
You can't excuse yourself from killing 10,000 people by pointing to another point in history where you killed 2,000,000 people. Instead of getting away with the 10,000, you are in fact now being held responsible for both
Oh god. Not another 'nice try
Go America! Dickheads.
You're wrong - it will save lives - American lives. Thats the point.
I really hope this challenge will be televised in some way. Network, cable, streamed over the net, anything.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
to go up against DARPA's robot army. I can't help but think of all those John Wayne westerns where a Hollywood back lot is made to look like a thousand acre ranch. I'm pretty sure similar techniques could be used to steer the robots and all their stereo vision technology right into a hydraulic crusher.
Three items jumped out at me when looking at some rules revisons...
[snip]
2. The participating teams are not required to provide a Safety Vehicle. DARPA will take responsibility for oversight of all vehicles on the Challenge Route.
Big black helicopter?
3. The participating teams are not required to develop an Emergency-Stop system. DARPA will provide and operate the E-stop for all teams.
Air to ground weapon system launched from said helicopter?
4. There is no specific requirement for general liability insurance for individual teams.
See previous two items.
[/snip]
Yes, but whats that got to do with the price of tea in D'ni?
The machines should never take over the fighting!!
It will not save lives in the long run.
fools!
War will become a spectator sport; with the only costs being civilan targets.
No, they were crippled by Saddam diverting the funds from the UN's "Oil for food" programs to build up his own affluent palaces.
But 10,000 civilians died
Guess what, hippie! That's what happens when you have a psychopathic dictator embedding military targets within heavily populated civilian centers. It's a tactic used to stir up outcry when the death toll starts rolling in, and you bought it; hook, line, and sinker. It doesn't matter how "smart" your weapon is, if it hits an Anti-air unit that so happens to be on the roof of a school, you're going to have civilian casualties.
How many more than 10,000 would be dead right now had Saddam still be left in power? The man had a "Minister of Rape" on his payroll for shit's sake!! The man was a butcher and a monster, and the Iraqi people will be in much better shape in the long run without him.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno