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Grand Challenge 1, Competitors 0
Ivan writes "According to the DARPA Grand Challenge Status Board, 2 bots were withdrawn before the race started and the remaining 13 were all disabled. Red Team and SciAutonics II tied at 7 miles, a bit short of the 142 miles required." CNN has coverage and interviews.
This was not a failure just because no one got further than seven miles. Contrary to a failure, this has been a grand success. DARPA spent around 13 million to host it, and got a lot of great minds in the public at large to start thinking of ways to solve very complex technological difficulties. In terms of sheer dollar value, the amount of technological research by private individuals easily surpassed the 13 million the government invested. Already companies are being created, and the wheels of commerce spun.
This benefits the public from the technology that is being created that otherwise lacked an impetus. It benefits industry by showing a host of new ideas that otherwise would have never come through the regular channels. It certainly benefits DARPA for sheer investment and public relations value. It can benefit future soldiers by reducing their risk to dangerous jobs. This also benefits the defense contractors that just got a small reminder that someone from out of nowhere could become a player - think of it as lighting a fire in their belly.
All told this was a challenge, and was never intended to be easily winnable. It certainly was advertised as being unlikely to be won this year. All told I think DARPA should hold more contests like this for other areas that have grown stagnant. For a historical perspective consider that Lindbergh crossed that Atlantic on just such a contest. A contest that inspired the X-Prize. Perhaps we should see DARPA become involved in future X-Prizes as well?
Just remember not to name the project skynet.
I don't think you've considered the immense complexity of simply adjusting your speed/direction to avoid a rock or pothole. Turn too fast, you flip (as at least one vehicle did). Next time you get in your car pay attention to just how many tiny speed/direction adjustments you make even on straight paved roads. Now add stuff you have to avoid and the process is incredibly complicated!
What's up with all the mechanical failures? Yeah, it's rough terrain, but we've been building human-powered vehicles that can handle it for decades! I'd think that keeping your engine going or your brakes from locking up would be the least "grand" part of the challenge.
You might to read the facts about challenge; SciAm for example had nice article.
But basically, it's not "just 142 miles in the middle of nowhere", but 142 miles with rather tight time limit (ie. they have to race almost as fast as human drivers would drive normally); exact route they HAD to follow (with some max. deviation allowed) was only disclosed few hours before start, and definitely wasn't just a straight line, and terrain was not just barren, it's pretty rough (meaning that staying on the road or path or whaver is a must) no matter how you look at it.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is an algorithm out there called the Kalman filter which does this. It's very complicated and rooted in probability theory, but it basically takes several sensor inputs, smooths out their response based on previous values (and known noise characteristics, such as the typical standard deviation from the truth) and makes a good assumption about where the sensors will be in the near-future.
It is very accurate, if you tune it properly (thats the tricky part)
This is very important for real time things because you need to begin to smoothly react to situations before they happen (ie, driving into an obstacle at high speeds).
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Whoa, look at this: with three minutes of typing and thinking, this Slashdotter just solved the problem that experienced engineers and computer scientists worked on nonstop for a year, at the cost of millions of dollars!
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This is why new drivers and people who are disorientated or distracted often have trouble driving.
For new drivers there are 2 factors working here. First is the lack of experience of WHERE to look. New drivers often keep their vision trained too close in front of the vehicle. This works for very very low speeds but once you try to go road speeds you just don't have enough time to react. Experience teaches us to lift our eyes higher and seek ahead further in order to drive effectively.
The second factor for new drivers is how to handle this new kind of input. Stuff that you don't worry about when jogging or running becomes a big problem when driving, like corners and wet roads. The increased distance also means that you have to have a different sort of thought process in order to handle the increased amount of information.
With disorientated or distracted drivers they may have the knowledge of how to handle the processing of driving stimuli but since they are at diminished capacity they are not able to do so fast enough. Drunk drivers, for example, often start slewing back and forth because their reactions are lagging behind what their senses are telling them. They turn, overturn, correct, overcorrect, and so on.
Sapere aude!
It is true that passing a simulated test is no measure of success in the real world. But it will certainly be more prepared, and in a faster time and with less expense than an "all up" design method.
Look at the space shuttle if you want an example of "all up" gone bad. I'm not talking about the end product, I'm talking about billions that were squandered during development. The waste of time and money during the engine testing was extraordinary.
Another example is the Mark XIV torpedo. Google around, but the long and the short of it is the navy deployed a torpedo without testing it. A series of design flaws kept them from working, and their failure cost us dearly during the early parts of the war.
The Navy refused to believe there was a problem. The weapon worked 50 percent of the time for the 2 shots that were fired before the war. When they tested the torpedos properly they found numerous problems with the design of the guidance system and the detonators.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
...how insane does this make the team that entered a motorcycle?
I suppose you weren't watching the live satellite feed when the motorcycle was demonstrated via remote control. It couldn't enter the race, but they just wanted to show it off.
It fell to the ground in literally 1 second.
Why they tried to solve a stabilization problem instead of an autonomy problem is beyond me. As I've said before, they engineered their own failing. This is different than the Red Team, where the basic hard problem of obstacle detection killed them.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
" I suspect that the first industrialised nation that develops autonomous fighting machines will take over the world"
I predict the opposite. Any industrialised nation sufficinatly advanced to create an autonomous fighting machine would have little to gain from taking over the world. With adequate robot labor, you would have no need to exploit the world. At that point, added territory is no longer a source of useful resources but only an administrative burden. Primitive peoples are difficult to civilize and govern. Sure, we might use our robot warriors to down a particulalry bloodthirsty dictator from time to time and seed a self-governing democracy, just as we have used human soldiers to do with Milosovic in ex-Yugoslavia and Hussein in Iraq. But the goal in both places is to install a democracy and get the hell out ASAP. Fighting wars with robots will not change the underlying economic calculus of occupuation. It won't make ruling over the conquered any less of a pain in the ass, or any more profitable a proposition than today.
The more technologically advanced we become, the more we substitute common substances for exoctic mineral resource imported from abroad. Why conquer Brazil for copper mines when you get zillion times the bandwidth of copper from silicon glass fiber which is make from sand ? Power lines ? Use a superconductor strands. Conquer Africa for daimonds ? Bah !We can grow them more pure, large and cheaper in a vacuum deposition chamber in a New Jersey shopping mall. Once we find an adequate subsitite for fossil fuels, or choose to rely more heavily on those which we already have such as fission, that will be one less thing which we need from the outside.
The danger of autonomous fighting machines is not that the nations which develop them would use them to take over the world. The danger is that those weapons would fall into the hands of hostile and primitie societes which do have that goal, the same theat we face today. The technologically advanced nations which invented chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons could use them to to enslave the world, but we don't do that. The expense of occupation is too high and the payoffs for us are too low. The real danger of such technology is that is falls into the hands of primitive societies in which a primal warmongering mindset dominates.
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