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Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge
doughnuthole writes "The official posting has been made of the 15 teams that qualified for the Grand Challenge, seven of which completed the entire QID course. The top three teams, and thus those who get to start first, were the Red Team, SciAutonics II, and Team Caltech. The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, with teams leaving every 5 minutes. A live webcast will be available at grandchallenge.org." Reader uss_valiant writes "Tomshardware runs an article about DARPA's Grand Challenge. It features new pictures, the DARPA video of the qualification and covers some technical challenges such as the obstacle detection."
For all those of us who don't have access to the DARPA channel, we can stream the telecast live from here.
These are the same people who appeared in this slashdot story and seems to be different from the "live webcast" mentioned in the story which only appears to have a tracking feature.
If a team leaves every 5 minutes, (and assuming the first few hundred yards is relatively easy going - you find that on most courses of any nature), then we are going to have an awful lot of bunching at the first point the vehicles start dropping below 25mph. Interestingly, the rules state that the team in front (i.e. being passed) has right of way, unless E-stopped.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
6:30? That means nothing in nowadays world!
WHAT TIMEZONE???
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
CNN is running a story about the DARPA race/challenge, in case anyone is curious.
And the odds on any of these machines even finishing the challange? Pretty slim, Red Team looks to have the best chances, pretty nice looking machine they've got going as well. All in the name of science and progression I guess .. but if the army vehicles auto targeting equipment couldn't distinguish the difference between a helicoptor and an incomming vehichle .. what are the odds on the software they put on the 'finished' development being any better? also pretty slim.
May as well just spend the money on deveoloping the something worthwhile.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Following the freakin DARPA it appeared at first as if it was a serious, tough, attempt to automate vehicles.
However, time after time they reduce the requirements for qualifying, and basically continually reduce the prestige of the event, now they are allowing all 15 teams to race, even though only 7 finished the much easier race (The last race, only the Carnegie Mellon team actually completed!)
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Informative? Wait I can do this do:
Last year I had a pottery course with a person who claimed her sisters, friends, dog trainers mother in law actually handled funding at DARPA. She said that this was actually a nefarious plan to speed up the development of killer robot cars that will one day rule the world!
Sorry, what can I tell you - I didn't get her number. She was too old for me.
But this is how DARPA works - it is very much an "Old boys" network. I was a postdoc in a robotics lab at a large university a few years back and we were competing for DARPA money for this project where robots walk up stairs. There was a DARPA guy who was a real colonel who would come to listen to presentations, and if he liked you then you got money. We didn't get the money. This was a project for a stair climbing robot, and the whole thing was a disaster, since none of the groups could make it work except with a hack - in other words only in very special situations. Anyway it made me really cynical about the whole DARPA robot thing. What they expect is incredibly unrealistic and results in people practically faking it.
How is this funding a university? The prize of $1m is unlikely to or perhaps only barely just cover the costs of any serious entry. People clearly aren't in it for the money.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Too late to enter my old Chevette? The title sounds like a new NBC reality show.
Winning the race might be worth $1m up front... but how much is a contract to build robotic vehicles for the US military worth? And of course, many universities would be researching automated robots even if the competition did not exist; winning an extra $1m is just a bonus.
According to previous comments at Slashdot, a map of the course has been leaked, meaning that entrants can cheat by pre-programming a course.
Its also a lot of publicity for the university... and I'm sure many an academic paper will be written by the teams... publish or perish!
When I was a Freshman at CMU, I worked on a research programming project translating a bunch of the Navigation code for this self-driving HMMWV ("Hum vee"). It was originally written in C, and we converted it to Ada... though I bet it's been reverted back to a more versatile language.
It used multiple cameras mounted at different heights to build a 3D view of it's surroundings, and could judge all kinds of obstacles... though at the time (7 years ago) had a lot of trouble with streams and shadows. I was amazed that it could recognize stoplights correctly, and even signaled when it was changing lanes on a street.
Either way, it was a great project for a young would-be programmer to work on, very amazing stuff, and lots of cool toys to see in the Robotics Institute there.
-Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned for
Actually I watched a show last night and they Highlighted the Red Team's Vehicle. After watching the show I was given no idication of any other competitors, but they didn't provide any reasons why the Red Team might not finish. Hell, after what I watched I'm wondering if any other teams are really even playing the same game... That is one high priced Hummer.
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
Assuming that "6.30 am" means local time in Barstow, California, that would be 6.30 PST -0800, or 14.30 GMT.
my computer is also eating it hardcore. its using up 88MB of ram on a 1.3 GHz t-bird.
/.??? not even a hint or a whisper all week? Did I not get the memo?
Not sure about that 10MB download though. It loaded up way to quick (on cable) to be 10 megs, even with the shockwave install.
P.S. how come there was no freakin' advance notice of this on
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Updated on the live status board A bit short of the original 250miles.
What we haven't landed on Mars yet?
Look, folks it's engineering. It takes time. Frankly, competition is good. You have to understand, most of these schools/people participating don't make multi-million dollar robots for a living. CMU is probably the best (where's MIT??). Maybe CalTech or Berkeley is a close second. We didn't win the space race overnight. Engineering takes time. Eventually, the competition will learn the best techniques and everybody profits. It's is an educational thing...
DARPA checklist:
-sentient AI
-robust hardware design
-massively parallel neural net
-robust error handling
-programmed fundamental laws of robotics
-able to withstand a tank blast
-able to withstand a bomb shell
-able to withstand a nuclear/biological/chemical attack
-able to withstand a REALLY BIG MAGNET!
Seriously, I think even Sadam could beat our robots! Just buy the mother of all big magnets (or make one). Oh that's right, they need electricity! Sorry, carry on. Maybe they could get a donkey to run on treadmill and make a generator.... (Okay, not so seriously.)
So, how robust can any robot be? All I need is a really big magnet and it's screwed.
Yeah, how come the Terminator/Matrix/Inspector Gadget never had to worry about magnets?
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Team Terramax is a collaboration between Oshkosh Truck and Ohio State University based on the MTVR, a six-wheeled, 425 HP, seven-ton truck.
I had the privilege of test-driving an MTVR on the obstacle course at their factory in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This truck, fully loaded, could take on hills steeper than feel comfortable taking on in an ATV. We forded streams, climbed over barricades, and did steep side grades, all without breaking a sweat. I've got no doubt that this vehicle is up to the Grand Challenge, if the guys at OSU have their technology in order...
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
You know, for a school that has an insane amount of Linux emphasis, I'm terribly disappointed that CMU chose to use *QuickTime* for the streaming format. Yeah, let me just grab my copy of Codeweaver's product, why don't I? Hell, CMU's cluster machines don't have Crossover. There are a zillion ways to stream data to mplayer, and sure enough, they choose the single way that can't be used on Linux short of buying something.
May we never see th
would they get their school students to design their next gen military hardware,
North Korea is proud of you
Info
Holy crap! Look at this guy's body. It's some sort of amorphous Michelin man goo. http://www.grandchallenge.org/gallery/Full/001026. jpg
I just get the Status Board and the tracking page, and in the tracking page (the flash animation), the Red Team bot is marked red, which would mean disabled! SciAutonics II is displayed as "paused". Do you see the same?
Anyone know how to let ShockWave run on Linux?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
It looks like they're only going to get 7 miles into this race. There must be some crazy feature that's keeping them from going any further. A bottleneck of some sort?
Well, as of now it looks like all that money went to naught, as the Red Team vehicle is disabled 7 miles out.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
As of 07:46:48 PST, 4 of the vehicles that were running are disabled.
Including the favorite, Red Team.
TerraMax has not begun to move, yet.
Fellowship 9/11
Red Team and SciAutonics II are dead at mile 7. Virginia Tech and Axion Racing are dead at the starting line. Team DAD is in the lead at mile 6. Team Caltech has been hung up at mile 1 for half an hour now.
Zero miles travelled. Team DAD is in the lead.
It looks like the top two teams have already been disabled at the 7 mile mark. "Disabled" has a specific meaning in this race, it means that the judges have pulled the plug on them continuing (via radio control), not that they neccesarily suffered a particular mechanical or system failure. This assumes that the status board is reporting information correctly, blah blah blah. Can anyone watching the satelite feed confirm?
SciAutronics II seems to be advancing anyway, despite being disabled. Is this the beginning of the end???
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
SciAutonics II is listed as "disabled", but it has advanced from 7 to 10 miles and shows green on the tracking diagram. Are they in or out?
Now it's back at 7 miles. (Must have been the tow truck. :-)
Well I dunno. I'm looking at this map it they (red team) seem to be in 2nd place behind team 21. I have no idea if they are stopped though. Are there like updates somewhere, besides this shockwave thing?
Oh, goody. Freshman programmers.
No offense, buddy. You're at CMU, which presumably means you're pretty smart. (I have friends who graduated CMU, and they're some of the brightest I've ever met.)
Not all freshman are novices, of course. I was programming for several years, professionally, before I went to college. I'm sure plenty of other people were, too.
But in general, it would take a hell of a software engineering environment to allow freshman programmers to contribute more than they cost. (CMU is the home of the Software Engineering Institute; maybe this was treated as a Level 4 project?)
I did some work in college for a company that tried to make software with undergrads, often freshmen. (Theoretically they were testing management techniques.) Time and again, I would track down a "bug" to a piece of code, and find that fixing it wouldn't solve the bug, only to discover that that piece of code had been copied-and-pasted to a hundred different locations, each slightly different (rather than parameterizing a function or refactoring).
My main contribution that year was to eliminate 3/4 of their code base. The fact that this software was tracking uranium for the DoE didn't make me feel any better.
Hey, if CMU can take freshmen and make productive programmers out of 'em, more power to 'em.
No vehicle has advanced for an hour now. Caltech is supposedly "running", but they've been at mile 1 for an hour. Team DAD is at mile 6, but paused. Are they being held up behind the bottleneck at mile 7, or what?
Seeing so many die right off. And noone making it very far.
I suppose it's all training for the next go.
Didn't the flying vehicle challenge start off this badly the first couple of years?
Next to start is the Ohio State monster truck. At the QID, it hit obstacles twice, so this should be entertaining.
Waiting to see self-balancing motorcycle. I wonder how it will negotiate the course now that many have failed.
Waiting to see how the motorcycle (The Blue Team) will do. I wonder if it can negotiate the course better than the other ones.
They've been paused by DARPA at mile 6 for an hour, presumably because of the CMU roadblock at mile 7. What's holding things up? Any word from the webcast?
Real driving involves seeing many things. Tablet PCs can't even read my handwriting if I write programming instructions.
There's also backtracking in case you can't find your way through a maze or roadblock.
Not to mention being able to ask for directions, finding fuel or requesting service.
How much brute force speed in terms of TFLOPS would be required?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I hope this poor "interactive 3d mapping" application isn't what DARPA has in mind for providing 'battlefield awareness' to our generals. Talk about taking the fog of war to an entirely new technology-driven level...
Watching the live broadcast, the cyberrider just refuses to fight! The flagman waved the green go flag and instead of charging like a good infantryman it just threw itself down to the ground! Of course its from Berkeley so no that suprising I guess.
Everybody else is either disabled or can't get past mile 1, but team DAD has been paused at mile 6, stuck behind the disabled CMU and Caltech vehicles, for hours now. They're getting a raw deal.
Anyone know why they withdrew?
My father is an ex-DARPA program manager who used to fund robotics research while there, and is one of the volunteer finish-line judges for this race. He volunteered because he figured there wouldn't be anything to do ... the defense contractor he now works for looked into creating their own entry, and decided against it upon concluding that nobody was likely to even come close to finishing (although he thought the CMU team would get the farthest). As now appears to be the case.
DARPA has announced that in light of the difficulties encountered this year, next's year event will be reworked as the "reasonably-ordinary-challenge' and consist of an autonomous vehicle locating the nearest McDonalds, ordering burgers and fries, and returning before they get cold.
They're the only ones who still have a chance, and DARPA has them paused, stuck behind the failed CMU and Caltech entries. Team DAD is basically one guy in Morgan Hill, CA, and if he's in the lead, it makes those big expensive projects that involve Government contractors look bad.
MPlayer plays normal QuickTime no sweat, but what's this application/x-esm MIME type? And what Debian package do I have to install to view it?
I imagine even Windows and Mac users aren't too happy at having to install yet-another-codec when plenty of other streaming video works just fine. Or is ESM some kind of fancy research project and CMU is just forcing all of us to be beta testers?
What they really need to win in a race like this is a black mid 80s Pontiac Trans Am.
They also needed to widen that front sensor and put some HID LEDs in a chaser for effect.
Then hire William Daniels to replace all the chime codes with his voice.
The Golem Group vehicle has reached mile 4. It looks like it's going about 3-4 MPH, and has passed SciAutonics I and the OSU monster truck.
Perhaps a pain in the butt to deal with, but a tracking client for Linux is available.
it's so disappointing that only 4 teams remain and no one has even reached 10 miles yet...
anyone know what time the race ACTUALLY started? it's pretty sad to think they've been at it for 3.5 hours and two teams (SciAutonics and TerraMax) are still on their 1st mile...
personally i'm rooting for Golem 'cause they have the best name :/
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I don't see Mr Magoo on the status board. How's he doing in the race?
And they're not getting anywhere. It's almost over.
Team DAD has just gone Disabled (ie DQ'd) after sitting unmoving for at least an hour (some of that time in the DARPA-commanded PAUSE state).
Meanwhile Golem hasn't moved for 15 minutes. The Mindtel site shows it alternating between PAUSE and RUN but it ain't going nowhere. Maybe it and DAD had trouble recovering from the PAUSE command?
TerraMax is now the only other officially RUNNING team besides Golem, and it hasn't moved for an hour either. Looks like this may be as far as anyone's going to get, unless Golem wakes up.
The shockwave app is lame. Making team DAD pause for so long sucked. This race is a big letdown. Stupid DARPA. Can't do anything right.
Even the fucking internet sucks.
And they're not getting anywhere.
Everybody's out.
The Golem Group vehicle was just disabled. That's the last one. It's over. SciAutonetics II and Red Team made it to 7 miles. Team DAD made it to mile 6. The Golem Group is listed with 5 miles, but the map never showed them much past the starting line. Nobody else got very far.
As of 18:59:29 GMT, it looks like all of the entries are either dead, or have been disabled. Hopefully, they'll be rerunning the race next year. . -bosozoku
Kinda dissapointing, I guess, although 7 miles through the desert with no driver is already fairly impressive.
peter
I don't have access to the DARPA feed, but according to the Status Board all entrants have either been marked as Disabled or Withdrawn. Unless the rules allow teams to repair disabled vehicles in the field (making them less than truly autonomous) it appears that the much-hyped Grand Challenge has been a total wash.
As of 10:57:22 PST, the last contender(The Golem Group) went to status Disabled.
A total of 28 miles were collectively traversed, with no participants getting past the 7 mile mark.
Thank you all for participating; we hope to see you all back here in 2006 for another try.
The 2006 event should be a real treat as we'll have clowns, jugglers and dancing girls. We'll also be introducing a new competing class called "Autonomous Disabled Autonomous Vehicle Tranport." The race for this class will begin 1 hour after the start of the main competion.
According to this all the teams are now disabled. What a poor showing. Too bad.
All joking aside, this is pretty hard/cool stuff. Early chess-playing computers were pretty laughable as well. They went from laughable to kicking Kasparov's butt in the span of few short years.
I'm looking forward to the next race... Go Red Team!
According to the status page all entries are disabled or withdrawn. I can't get their broadcast software working on my 2000 box, it keeps saying it can't write to a .txt file.
Anyone have an update?
... 30 years ago, in their "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch.
If part of the purpose of this race is to help develop an autonomous mobile supply carrier truck, then the strategy you talk about would actually be useful. Think of it as an "electronically coupled off-rail train", and the implications and applications become obvious.
Such technology would be useful for so many purposes - coupled with an actual autonomous navigation system that work, one or the other could be switched out as needed (ie, if the lead is taken out by a mine, perhaps, the next behind could take over "lead", keeping the train moving forward, and around the "dead" lead truck).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
That was so much fun...
Let's do it again tomorrow!
Actually, DARPA did hold out tomorrow as an alternate date in case the event couldn't be held today. And I'll bet some of the teams would be up for it!
from http://www.grandchallenge.org/statusboard/
Looks like all vehiches have been disabled and the furthest any of them got was 7 miles. Red Team tied with SciAutonics at the 7 mile mark before going kaput.
I work with autonomous robots in a lab setting. It's difficult enough to get a 2 wheeled robot the size of an RC car that moves 75 cm/sec to navigate its environment reliably. Failure is something you simply have to learn to live with and learn from (many computer scientists have a tough time getting used to the idea that these systems cannot nor ever will work 100% of the time). Honestly, you learn way more from failure than success in this business.
To get a full sized vehicle working at battlefield speeds with battlefield obstacles is a monumental challenge and almost certainly guaranteed to fail on the first try. Autonomous robotics is still a very young field, and the research published out there is generally some pretty rudimentary stuff done in a lab. Translating that stuff into a big complicated machine in a big complicated environment is a hell of a task and probably demonstrates some substantial holes in the current tech that weren't apparent from the confines of the lab.
This DARPA challenge does two excellent things for the field: Gives it a real goal and gives it a real deadline. Alot of research doesn't have a deadline and so researchers spend much of their time spinning their wheels (heh) on some of what i would consider, less important issues. This challenge gives a genuine goal to accomplish in a certain amount of time.
I definiately want to see the post-mortem on each team to see where they failed. In 2 more years, with this failure experience gained, perhaps a quarter of the teams will succeed or at least get further down the course.
-
From the wires of the Associated Press:
According to Yahoo - they are all out of the race after 7 miles or so.
;)
I'm surprise no one get a tank and just put the rock on the pedal and let it go. Seems like the cheapest and most reliable
From the DARPA satellite Feed News Update the video showed RedTeam in a mountain switchback road but not on the road per say. Actually off to the edge of the road where a berm seperated the road from the steeper downhill. The Humvee was stranded on the dirt berm. All 4 tires seemed to be on the road but the dirt was definately up to the bottom of the vehicle leaving it high and dry. Smoke was coming lightly out of the engine.
That was quick, they're all dead.
it's over. how utterly disappointing.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
I'm interested in the post-mortem. Of the failures, how many of them were purely hardware (mechanical failure, electronics breakdown, etc.), and how many of them were software (incorrect navigation, or AI-induced hardware failure like deciding to take a curve too fast and rolling the vehicle)?
Hi,
I'm on Team Caltech and I thought I should point out that we actually were stuck in a bunch of barbed wire.
I also heard some rumor that Carnegie Mellon's "catastrophic engine failure" was actually codespeak for "crashed into a pole failure" before Waypoint 7, and I also heard SciAutonics II did exactly the same thing (as CMU)... but don't take my word for it, as teammembers get surprisingly little info from DARPA.
you do realize that they are starting the race at 6:30 AM! there aren't many geeks I know that are up anytime before noon.
It's not like CMU hadn't already had the race rules changed so they could stick a bunch of waypoints in their 10-cm-resolution survey data... *sigh*