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Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge

Posted by michael on from the lowered-expectations dept.

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."

11 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, by SharpFang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    6:30? That means nothing in nowadays world!
    WHAT TIMEZONE???

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    1. Re:The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, by HeghmoH · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, that's real informative. You already gave two separate time zones there, which are an hour apart, so which one would it be? Plus, the submitter didn't say it was local time for the race. Maybe he lives in micronesia and he meant local time for him. How can we know?

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    2. Re:The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Uh, for the non-Americans, what's that relative to GMT?

  2. Re:Weird fact by m00nun1t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  3. Re:Following... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The prior event was the QID it was designed to determine the saftey of the vehicles only. they didn't change the rules mid-event (as the earilier post would have you believe). But a prior to the start of the QID.
    A lot of folks are spending tons of time and energy attacking a hard problem. If DARPA thinks they deserve to watch their car leave the "official" start line, it's DARPA's decision to make. It's DARPA's event, they can run it however they want to, if they wanted to tape rubber ducks on the hoods prior to departure, they could ask eveyone to do so.

  4. Re:Too Late by eclectro · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The title sounds like a new NBC reality show

    I'm surprised that a network isn't covering this live or at least making an hour show out of it. They get free content and every geek in the world will be watching.

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  5. Re:Weird fact by fake_name · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Weird fact by DavidDeLux · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  7. Are we there yet? by 1iar_parad0x · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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  8. Darn CMU robotics people by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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  9. Real Driving by PingPongBoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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