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DARPA Grand Challenge Kicks Off March 13th
GillBates0 writes "A quick reminder that the DARPA Grand Challenge is due to kick off March 13, the coming Saturday." He points to this "quick recap of the teams participating in the event," as well as details about the available satellite feeds. "The Atlanta-Journal Constitution is running a story about the event today. Quoting Frank Dellaert, co-director of Georgia Tech's robotics lab from the article, 'I would have trouble driving some of these roads myself. I think it's beyond the capabilities of autonomous vehicles today.' (shameless school plug). We'll see if the participants can prove him wrong."
Iphtashu Fitz adds a link to the New York Times' coverage of the trans-Mojave race, whose participants include "among other things a seriously tricked out motorcycle. The race is being run by the Pentagon, who is offering a $1 million prize to the builders of the first robot to successfully navigate a 200 mile route across the desert. ... a blog on ScienceBlog about the race has just started as well."
The reason this race is being done in a desert environment and sponsored by DARPA is so the US can take over more middle eastern nations.
Yes, mod parent down. I'm the author of the original article.
This post highlights something very important - that innocent people are going to die as a result of this 'challenge'. Rather than put DARPA money into reseraching alternative fuel sources - a noble goal, they put it into killing machines to take over oil fields.
I don't think you're going to get six good laser rangefinders for $5000. I don't remember the numbers as well as I would like, but I think the current favorite rangefinders (I think the brand is SIC?) are well over $1000 each. And you will quickly exhaust your laptop's computational power just denoising the output from crappy sensors. Heck, maybe even for the best sensors.
Autonomous vehicles have already driven across the country on highways, 98.2% of the time without human intervention. The roads it drove on are (I'm guessing) likely to be much nicer than those in the desert. Furthermore there was a human available to handle the surprises. For humor value: I believe one of the self-driving vechicles from CMU has a learner's permit from the state of Pennsylvania. See No Hands Across America for more info on this project.
The hard part of any project like this is uncertainty in the environment. The road may "disappear" completly from your sensors, or you may spot multiple roads. Maybe some mica on a rock screws up your rangefinder. Maybe your vehcicle's transmission gets a little "funny" and you can't shift properly anymore (I saw such a comment attached to this article). And we aren't even talking about genuine malfunctions like a failing rangefinder or sticky throttle.
I think autonomous systems might be the best example of the best laid plans of mice and men not succeeding when the slightest thing goes wrong. In fact, Steinbeck's story seems directly analgous to the problems of self-driving vehicles.
-Paul Komarek
Okay, I can live with that. Let's just say I lowballed it, and move on.
I have a hard time beliving that. With multi-multi-GHz processors available, I think it can be done. You'd only need to sample each one about 10x each second.
At which point you quickly slow-down to a crawl until your sensors are able to re-locate the road. At worst, you'd have a 5MPH accident that your vehicle would have to recover from on it's own.
With an automatic transmission, I can't see that as being a real problem...
I accounted for 2 sensors on front, left, right. Perhaps we can say I lowballed that too, and can go for 3 on front, left, right, and rear. The computer can simply then go with the consensus (2 out of 3).
Not much of an issue. If it's going too fast, the brake can always be applied. I would hope the software would have enough smarts for that. (I'm accounting for digital feedback from the car's speedometer).
I wouldn't think of deploying this on crowded city streets, but there's less destruction when you make a mistake in the middle of the desert.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I have to take issue with the ideas expressed that, a) the Team Red robot is not autonomous, and b) there isn't any impressive technology in their robot.
First, I'll address a). Autonomous means that it drives itself with no outside control. I'm assuming that you are implying that having detailed maps constitutes outside control. I disagree. When a person drives somewhere they've never been before, they usually use maps themselves. If they've been there and are familiar with the area, they basically already have a mental map that they consult. Pre-mapping the terrain and giving that map to the robot is providing essentially the same kind of information. The robot still must perform extensive obstacle avoidance, and must be able to deal with the rough terrain that it will encounter, which happen to be the harder tasks than simply knowing what the general path to take is beforehand. Addtionally, I might point out that the general aim for the whole challenge is to produce vehicles for the Military - do you really think that the Military would not want to be able to provide detailed maps to any autonomous convoy or fighting vehicle ahead of time?
Now to address b). If there wasn't any impressive technology in this robot, the Grand Challenge wouldn't be very much of a challenge, would it? One of the parts I find pretty impressive is the sensor array on that robot, which stabilizes itself, and "looks" the direction of the path the robot wishes to travel, much like a human does when driving. That's actually pretty cool, in my book.
Honestly, all of the teams have pretty impressive technology. I don't think it is really appropriate to insult another team in the competition.
More likely is that they want other people to research how to build a future battledroid to capable of military-level spy/front-line army work... capable of survivng desert conditions for a given number of miles.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I'm disappointed that there is not more information available about this event as it happens. I've been following it vicariously for months, and now I'd like to hear about what is happening at the speedway in Fontana. How many teams showed up? How many tried out today? Which passed, which failed? I haven't been able to find out any of that information.
The so-called Science Blog article was from February 10! That's not exactly timely, is it?
Nagle's later posting here does present some information about Caltech. The Caltech team web page provides the same basic info, with a little different spin. But I guess we're lucky they posted today; the previous entry on the team's news page was dated November 16, 2003.
CMU has been updating almost every day, but their last entry was Saturday, saying "The curtain goes up Monday morning". Again, what happened?
You'd think in this age of bloggers, when every windbag on the net sees fit to tell us what he had for lunch that day, someone would be watching this event and posting some updates in the evening. If this isn't happening, I beg anyone who is attending to step up and start writing! Maybe I'm spoiled by the usual instant access to information, but I'm passionately interested in this event and starving for news.
You say I'm wrong without any facts to back it up, and someone is supposed to believe your claim?
You say you're right without anything to back it up, and someone is supposed to believe your claim?
Nae bother