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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."
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!
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.
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.
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.