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."

Comments

Education

[gid13]

In vaguely related news, this Friday, my Eng Phys class (okay, not mine, I did it last year) is requiring the students to slalom autonomous vehicles around pylons of arbitrary position (though powered devices are allowed on top).

As I said, I did the course last year (it was easier at the time), and let me tell you, it's harder than it looks. Hats off to anyone who even comes close to finishing this.

The Real Purpose Of This Contest

[Rhett]

Is to prove to the pentagon that terrorists with a million dollars in funding can't build this.

Unfortunately, no one will will this contest.

Whatever happened to the wilderness areas?

[Whatsmynickname]

How will these robots be routed around wilderness areas generated by the California Wilderness Protection Act?

Wasn't the Barstow to Vegas motorcycle race cancelled due to declaration of these same wilderness areas? How is DARPA ensuring these vehicles aren't going to run over some tortoise?

Dont' get me wrong, as I'm no tree-hugger. However, it seems the Wilderness protection act only applies to people who cannot afford a congressman...

Re:Whatever happened to the wilderness areas?

[Whatsmynickname]

See, that's what confuses me...

I thought the wilderness act didn't allow any vehicles at all. I can't even ride a mountain bike through a wilderness area. Yet, they allow this race with unmanned vehicles?

Ironically, I wouldn't be allowed to test my own USV, if I were in the process of developing one, in the same area. Even if I were testing a UAV, the UAV would not be allowed to land on any wilderness property!!! I shouldn't even ask about riding a motorcycle through here...

Yet, they're going to let these vehicles rip through a supposedly fragile ecosystem? I ask, where is the fairness in all of this?

Entries too complicated?

[evilviper]

Is it just me, or are these entries too complex?

I admit I haven't made anything like this (although I've made some very advanced machines before) but it seems to me that a half-dozen laser range-finders connected to a laptop would do just nicely.

You could tell how far you were from the left/right of the road, and how far in-front of you an obsticle or change in terrain is (and can slow-down appropriately).

I suppose you'd also have to throw-in a $200 GPS reciever, since they have a "course", and you'll need to do more than just follow the road. But that seems to be all you'd need to accomplish this (yes I'm glossing over the basics, because they're just the basics).

So please, find fault in my idea. I'd like to know why this $5000 solution wouldn't work, and why 3+ million is required.

Re:Entries too complicated?

[Paul Komarek]

You want to minimize the chance of destruction whether you're on a city street or in the desert. I doubt there's a prize for coolest disaster.

On the other stuff, I think I didn't communicate my point effectively. You can't just read sensors and rely on their data. Sensors return wrong data, even laser rangefinders. Picking out which data is good and which is bad requires more computation than just 10 serial port reads per second.

Until a person has been involved with these sorts of projects it is very hard to even imagine the scope of the problems. I don't have much robotics experience, my field is data mining and artificial intelligence. But even there the data is always screwed up. Nobody ever gives you a dataset that is complete, or training data that is correct. Much of the time it isn't clear what "correct" even means. The real world sucks big time.

And software sucks big time. I did do some robotics programming for a local company, to control elevators used by their robots. The problems involved were insane. We had troubles getting the elevator companies to give us access to the elevator call buttons (the buttons in the hallways) and the elevator direction and destination -- and I can tell you that getting all that info (which we didn't) was going to cost a lot more than $5000 per installation. We had to estimate the elevator's direction according to floor data, which isn't that hard -- until you run into the problem of elevators which don't have any floor info (some cargo elevators). Then there's the issue of communication. We couldn't run a wired network, and wireless did a poor job penetrating into some elevator cabins. That meant that the elevator doors might open on the wrong floor (due to humans pressing buttons), and we couldn't notify the robot. And we didn't have access to the "door open" button so we had to rely on holding down the floor button. There's also the matter of telling the robot that the cabin has arrived to pick it up -- we don't know when the doors open, and different elevators can take a vastly different amount of time to open the doors.
Thankfully the robot could help a bit for that particular problem.

And I haven't even begun to tell you about the robot navigation problems getting into and out of the elvator, especially for elevators that didn't line up right with the floor. And if there's a wide gap between the elevator and the floor, the rangefinders think there's a 10-storey cliff in front of it. And once you get the robot going, it's wheels might not work well crossing a two-inch gap. But you can't change the wheels because their design is critical to the navigation software.

This was what I encountered in 3 months of consulting for a robotics company whose robots drove very slowly along the walls of uncluttered hallways. All of the problems were dealt with eventually, and many of them had autonomous solutions. But now the robots have a webcam that allows humans to drive it out of bad situations that the software still can't deal with.

Did I mention that the robot tracked the wall to help its navigation? Now think about driving across a sand-covered highway through a sand-covered plain. I'm not sure what these guys are really facing, but I'm sure it's a lot harder than we can possibly imagine.

-Paul Komarek

I don't trust this "Pentagon"

[flopsy mopsalon]

It is a well known fact that military vehicle driving is one of the few high-paying positions that less-educated individuals can qualify for.

It is equally obvious that by using this so-called contest, the Pentagon is trying to obtain for themselves a cheap automated replacement for human vehicle operators. No hazard pay, no training no insurance needed for robots. And a bargain at $1 million.

And where will that leave formerly well-paid and regarded vehicle operators? Walkng across minefields with poking sticks, that's where. I for one am shocked and appalled.

Mark Burnett where are you?

[John Harrison]

Somebody really missed the boat here. They should have turned this into a reality TV show. Film each of the teams getting ready, introduce us to the robots, and then film the race, editing it for maximal drama.

I can't believe that somebody didn't buy this thing up. If not a broadcast network then at least the Discovery Channel (science oriented angle) or Spike TV(monster truck robots race across the desert angle).

Somehow I don't think that the military feed is going to reach a wide audience. I won't be able to see it.

Re:Mark Burnett where are you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do media work for one of the teams, and we hired a crew and shopped footage around to Discovery, Spike, etc.

I think the nets are afraid after Robot Wars has kind of stalled. This race is a little over their heads. PBS NOVA did show up, and will do a 1 hour special.

In reality, International press has been all over us, while US Press has just started to get interested.