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DARPA Grand Challenge Updates
GraffitiKnight writes "After only 1 team managed to successfully navigate the DARPA Qualifying course, DARPA has rewritten the rules to let almost everyone compete. Wired has the story, which also mentions rumors that the race will run to 150 miles, much less than the original plans of 210 - 300 miles." Here is some earlier Slashdot coverage of the race.
From the Previous Story
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.'
I guess he was right after all...
The QID was pathetic. We spent two days watching vehicles move around at 1MPH and hit big, obvious obstacles. No way can most of those vehicles operate effectively offroad.
The big design mistakes seem to be these:
Only CMU is doing well. It's not the money, by the way. Their actual cash outlays are only about $300K to date. It's the body count and the fear. They have about fifty people on the project, a slavedriver boss, and the full backing of CMU. CMU has to do well; most of the Robotics Institute funding over the last three decades is from DARPA, and DARPA can turn that money off at any time.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
I will be more impressed if the autonomous motorcycle makes it ten miles than I will be for Red Team to win the whole thing, because at least this bike is fully autonomous and has some radical new ideas going into it, instead of just tons of resources and brute-force mapping.
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Or the Patriot Defense System, which routinely targeted friendly aircraft during development, failed miserably the first time it was put into use(for a use it was never intended- it's never been used for what it was originally designed for, shooting down planes) and then 10+ years later was used again and resulted in the deaths of dozens of UK soldiers because it couldn't tell the difference between a helicopter traveling at less than 100 kt and an enemy missile traveling over the speed of sound?
Don't blame the technology when its being used in perverted ways. You yourself said that is meant for shooting down planes. It should not have shocked anyone when they tried to use it for something else and it didn't work.
The defense department is famous for bidding scandals(if contracts are put out to bid at all), and being happy to look the other way and fudge the requirements(or ignore them completely) if the system fails to meet original requirements.
I'd like you to name a bidding scandal then. Also, requirements are usually dropped because they were pointless in teh first place or just plain wrong. Valid requirements are rarely relaxed. Remember, requirements documents are written by committe. What sounds good on paper frequently doesn't work in real life. Anyone who's spent even a day on a goverment contract knows this.
This country needs three things. First, a true capitalist system for defense contractors. You want to sell the Army a tank? Fine. You can do so all on your own, without a single fucking dime, and then try and sell it. If it can't compete, too bad, your company goes under- that's the way capitalism works.
That's completely impractical. It costs too much to design a tank -- only about 3 or 4 companies in the United State could do it. Furthermore, the gov't doesn't want your tank, they want their tank. Most contracts work like this:
Its done this way on purpose, because the goverment likes to be in control.
Second, defense contractors need to be held responsible for when their products fail. Refunds for starters, contracts that can be invalidated on failure, civil/criminal punishments for gross design/construction failures. Actually, they are held liable. There is this long whole process called testing, the contractor is liable until the item passes the tests. The gov't won't assume liability until it passes tests.
Third, absolutely, positively, no secret budgets of any kind. I am entirely pissed off with the pentagon filling up with all the kids who had secret treehouse clubs when they were kids and want to do the same shit now that they're 40.
The fact that you bring this up at all proves that you have no idea WTF you are talking about. People outside the defence community rarely understand the need for such paranoia or why we have it. But let me put it to you this way: how many security leaks do we have and have had in this country? The answer: not many. The reason: because the gov't takes security seriously, and understands it better to secure too much than secure too little.