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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Ivan writes "According to the DARPA Grand Challenge Status Board, 2 bots were withdrawn before the race started and the remaining 13 were all disabled.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.
A guy on a mule has been evading the might and majesty of the United States Army in the Afghan mountains for over two years.
Has the "privateer" race been done? It would be nice to see a privateer complete the challenge.
I think that even though they only got 7 miles into the course, thats still damn good engineering. Maybe next year they will have worked out what has gone wrong and figured out a way to flesh out an autonomous robot (Or hide a midget navigator somewhere!).
Monster Car do?
The whole thing makes you conisder just how much processing power we use to control our speed around curves and avoid potholes when we're driving. We can integrate a hell of a lot of information, process the relavent signals and adjust our behavior in milliseconds. And that's not adding the additional struggle of trying to get your iPod to play through the stereo system....
It means that autonomous fighting machines are still some way off.
I suspect that the first industrialised nation that develops autonomous fighting machines will take over the world (or at least have a damn good go).
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
They tried and died.
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!
One of the rovers got tangled with barbed wire, another had a malfunctioning satalite navagation system (GPS?), one broke its axle, and one rolled over... So its not as easy as it seems, the terrain must be pretty rough to have a car over turn or break its axle.
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
There were engineered obstacles, such as barbed wire and the like. And the deserts out here are not like the Sahara. They have washes and rock formations and various natural obstacles. Finally, a lot of the problems were mechanical or technical-brakes locking up and such. So it isn't as simple as it sounds.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Hate to break it to you but the desert is far from a "completely barren plan, with very few obstacles".
Even with a previously traveled path and prepared track it's not uncommon for VERY well financed race teams to fail to finish in a desert race. Most desert racers consider it a win just to make it to the finish line and that's with a driver!
Look into the SCORE side of this challenge a bit more and you'll find a LOT of info about just how challenging desert racing is with drivers - let alone trying to do it autonomously.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
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
Yes, this was a grand challenge. But it would be nice if teams could solve part of the problem at first, get some recognition and minor prize money for that, and then move on.
So perhaps step one should have been just doing a long ordinary road course, minimal obstical avoidance, just handling roads, turns, potholes, ramps and even traffic lights (where you are told they are).
That contest would provide useful civilian tech and also useful military tech in terms of a autonomous vehicles to carry cargo in a controlled area with intact roads.
Or you could also imagine autonomous vehicles which handle roads, but then get to a rough patch they can't handle. At the rough patches you station soldiers who drive/remote control the vehicles over the rough patch, but you need far fewer because they stay in one place and only do the rough patch. Let humans do what they can do and computers do the boring long-haul road drive.
Next, hold a contest for a shorter rough course with obstacles.
Finally, combine the two.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
To be fair, they were looking for him in the region of Afghanistan known as Iraq.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
...how insane does this make the team that entered a motorcycle?
The first tanks could only go a thousand yards before breaking down, and they had a 7 man crew.
it didn't take long for things to change.
Just like 1000s of geeks worldwide, I watched this with great interest. But the whole organization thing left me with a funny taste in the mouth.
It seemed as if the group that could throw the most money at the "problem" would win. Take the CMU team for example: they paid for a high-res survey of the area; had undergrads map out each and every obstacle in all of the possible paths; etc. Now, if the goal of this "grand challenge" was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, then it failed. Money != Entrepreneurial spirit.
Taking lessons from the RoboCup people, I would have preferred that DARPA organize it as follows:
- Create a simulator for the sensors, and design a small (virtual) course for this simulator. Let people develop algorithms using this simulator, and have a competition in this virtual simulator to select a set of (say) 30 teams.
- Provide each of these teams a platform: a humvee equipped with the sensors (actual ones from (1) above). Of course, if a team wants, it can add its own sensors.
- After some time, hold a "grand challenge".
- Analyse the approaches taken by the various teams, and (important) share the code among the teams. If a team designs a new sensor that is useful, get copies made and share with the teams for the next iteration.
- Go back to step (1) above, and repeat.
Preference could be given to schools or efforts involving students, as not only is this a great learning experience, but also it will be a great motivator.Just look at the technology gap between CMU and the rest of the entrants. It is quite an achievement that someone was able to equal CMU in performance.
There are a lot of smart hackers out there who would love to take a crack at this problem, but the lack of hardware is a serious hurdle.
I was thinking about that a few months ago when I was working on a film shoot. I had to run some supplies between a remote location and the base camp. The terrain was really rough-- this was a forest, and it had a lot of trees, roots, rocks, crevices and the like. And I absolutely, positively had to be at the base camp ASAP.
I found myself running as fast as I could, but my mind set up an interesting pipeline. I was always looking five to eight feet in front of me and my brain feverishly tried to parse out what was a rock, what was a branch, what was a big root, what was sloped ground, what was even ground, etc. Then, that information got passed to a route-choosing part of my brain that decided where the best place was to put each foot: left, right, left, right. That information, in turn, went to my brain's motor department, which was actually in charge of balance, weight distribution, and muscle movement to actually put the feet where they were supposed to be and keep my momentum without falling.
I call this a pipeline because my eyes never left that five-to-eight foot range. When I was selecting any bit of route, I was already looking at the next bit of route and stepping on the last bit of route. I never looked at my feet, but somehow always put them where they needed to be.
I wouldn't make such an analogy anywhere other than slashdot, but I could feel that the load average on my brain was as high as it could be. I didn't have any free cycles to think about my day, or have a song in my head, or think of my next joke, as I usually do. Every ounce of my concentration was going to these automatic, practically sub-conscious processes. I know was processing as fast as I could -- any faster, and my brain would tell me, "I can't parse the terrain that fast," or "I can't decide on a route that quick."
Don't give me any credit for it, because it has nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence, but I was solving an extraordinarly tough problem very quickly. In short, if I could bring my brain to the edge, I can see how tough this is for the DARPA contestants!
With robots sponsored by Microsoft, IBM, Apple, etc. going head to head, man, that would be awsome to watch!
Microsoft's robot would break down frequently and require human maintenance.
IBM's would work well, but would have an obscurely-shaped fuel system that requires expensive IBM Fuel Cells(tm). The racing team would all be wearing suits.
Apple would produce a shiny, glossy, and reasonably reliable robot that scratched incredibly easily and had bits of the body break off when traveling along. The sound system would be an iPod.
May we never see th
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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http://dgc.gi.alaska.edu/Overview_2_1_04.htm Section 2.4.1
Don't mod this cut-n-paste troll up anymore.
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I have worked on a university project that is developing an autonomous robotic vehicle. The project is the Autonomous Robotic Vehicle Project (ARVP). Our team consists of a number of undergraduate and graduate engineering and computer science students. We participate annually in the IGVC (Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition). The IGVC is a relatively simple challenge: navigate an obstacles course delineated by a pair of white lines marking the boundaries of the "road" and avoid obstacles such as traffic barrels. Max. speed is 5mph. Sounds simple right? Even a two-year-old could do it crawling.
Wrong. The IGVC has run for over 10 years, and in the last three years not a single team has completed the autonomous challenge. Teams from all over the world from prestigious universities compete, but autonomous navigation is not easy.
The first challenge is hardware: high-quality sensory equipment is expensive. Witness the thousands of dollars costs to purchase laser rangefinders, let alone radar or LIDAR. As well, computing power plays a large role, particularly at the speeds the Grand Challenge vehicles running.
The second challenge is software: It is not easy to write consistent vision algorithms. For example, simply the shadows cast off of trees on a sunny day can easily throw off line-recognition algorithms. I cannot imagine the difficulties that teams in the Grand Challenge experienced trying to recognize potholes and ditches.
The third challenge is reliability: All systems must work nearly perfectly together under a variety of conditions. The conditions at the Grand Challenge are far from ideal, and are in fact extremely difficult. The vehicles had to negotiate with dust, ditches and holes, overpasses, sand hazards, water hazards, fences and other obstacles.
All of these factors, which are quite easily dealt with in the amazing system known as the human mind, are very difficult for an autonomous vehicle. To be honest, I feel that seven miles is an extraordinary accomplishment under the race conditions. Few individuals honestly expected that the race would be completed.
Looks like most of the vehicles "crashed" (one way or another) pretty early on. Aside from a few scattered details (one apparently got tangled in barbed wire, a few flipped, some didn't start), anyone have a full list of What Happened to each of them?
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
One might think a brick jammed on the accelerator of a jeep or H2 might have a chance to make it 7 miles.
Not without refueling, of course.
This is *great* news!
It means that autonomous fighting machines are still some way off.
This is a really weird sentiment to see on a technology website. I grant you that an autonomous fighting machine would be a bad thing to release on the world, but they'd still be a ways off even if some contestants passed the DARPA challenge. So many advances are necessary for an "autonomous fighting machine", that I think we can comfortably benefit from the development of robotic ATVs without worrying that they will someday rule the world.
Are you happy every time a chip design fails, because that postpones the inevitable rise of the "automous fighting machine"? Are you excited when you hear that Honda has to delay the release of ASIMO-2 because they can't get the hip-joints to work properly? Yet another set-back for the conquering strategy of the "autonomous fighting machine"!
It's also weird that someone else here thinks you're luddite comments are insightful.
Have teams done some real life testing before going to competition? Or they just did theoretical tests simulating on computer?
After all, you've got to remember that the world's fastest computers, the really, really big iron out there, still have about as much computational power as your average cockroach.
Not that I would condone such a thing, but, hey, if you're designing delivery systems for the US military, I think you've already lost the moral high ground.
Both CMU and Caltech seem to have failed on Power Line Road near Camp Rock Road, That's a rather boring piece of terrain, and seemingly easier than the first two miles. Again, what went wrong?
In fact, it is not even clear what we can learn from failure like that, which we could not learn otherwise.
Flashy things like this race do not necessarily tell us anything more about deep problems of AI. One can spend millions and millions and not get any closer to the goal.
After a few years competing in robot wars and battlebots I know how tough it is to think of something, pull it together in your spare time, and get it to the competition in one piece. And that's just souped up remote contol cars with saw blades. These are auto-fucking-nomous trucks.
This is damn good and all the competitors should be proud.
...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 was lucky enough to have a press pass. We had to get to Barstow at 5:00am (driving up from LA) which was rough. Driving in the dark along the highway leading to the start, we topped a rise and in the valley below portable lights had been strung up creating an oasis of light. As we got closer we could see the satelite uplink trucks, grandstands, police, and military.
After registering and getting our fancy orange safety vests, we went to the starting line and were able to get some great pictures as the bots prepared to start the race. Red Team (from Carnegie Mellon) had the best qualifying time so they were first out of the gates. Their 3 million dollar hummer started off fast and was quickly out of sight. The four helicopters filming from the air were flying dangerously close to each other trying to get a good shot so it was easy to track where the vehicle was.
SciAutonics II was the next bot out of the gate, the also had a good start and proceeded out of view. About this time we heard the good news, Team Red was seven miles down the course. Soon after we got the bad news, Red Team's vehicle had died. The odds on favorite was eliminated by a mechanical failure after only 7 miles.
Several of the rest of the bots failed to get past the first turn, and the rest either withdrew or failed within a few miles. The six wheeled ENSCO lost control, ran up the embankment, and overturned. Of the 100+ teams who built bots, 25 were invited to qualify, 15 of those were allowed to race, and only 7 of those made it more than a mile.
All in all it was an excellent experience. My suggestions for next year (or for the openchallenge, etc) would be to do the race in segments like the WRC does. Divide the 200 mile race into 10 mile segments, teams get points based on their performance for the stage. If you fail a stage you're not eliminated, you just fall in the rankings. Teams are allowed an hour of maintenance between stages to fix any problems they think they can fix. This would make it both a lot more interesting, and a lot more satisfying.
The difficult problems need to be presented outright at first, so you don't invest too much time in something that can solve simple issues, but fails utterly at more complex ones.
The ultimate goal of autonomous robotics is to develop a system that interacts with the real world at least as well as human, if not better.
If you start off with a simple challenge, you will get simple answers. For the next challenge, you ramp up the challenge some, and most will just modify the simple system. At some point though, you can't modify what is fundamentally flawed, and you have to throw it all away and start over.
Thats a huge waste of time and resources. If the teams recognizes the *tough* challenges from the outset, they're more likely to come up with a system that is flexible enough to handle them when the time and ability comes. Granted, you may spend more time developing that framework before you solve simple issues, but its worth it in the end.
Now the teams know what real-world issues they face. Their future systems will be much better equipped to handle them as they come along.
I suspect DARPA was well aware that this challenge could not be met. But the teams and technology are better off for it.
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Here's a very good
From http://www.grandchallenge.org/gallery/Day6.html
.5 miles, the vehicle was disabled.
Preliminary Data from DARPA Grand Challenge
As of 11:00 a.m. PST, March 13, 2004
Vehicle 22 - Red Team - At mile 7.4. Vehicle went off course, got caught on an obstacle and rubber on the front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished. Vehicle has been disabled.
Vehicle 21- SciAutonicsII - At mile 6.7. Vehicle went into an embankment and became stuck. Vehicle has been disabled, and the team is recovering it.
Vehicle 5 - Team Caltech - At mile 1.3. Vehicle went through a fence, and couldn't come back through. Vehicle has been disabled, and the team is recovering it.
Vehicle 7 - Digital Auto Drive - At mile 6.0. Vehicle was paused to allow a wrecker to get through, and, upon restarting, sensors were not able to determine the proper route. After sensors tried unsuccessfully for three hours, vehicle was disabled.
Vehicle 25 - Virginia Tech - Vehicle brakes locked up in the start area. Vehicle has been removed from the course.
Vehicle 23 - Axion Racing - Vehicle circled the wrong way in the start area. Vehicle has been removed from the course.
Vehicle 2 - Team CajunBot - Vehicle brushed a wall on its way out of the chute. Vehicle has been removed from the course.
Vehicle 13 - Team ENSCO - Vehicle flipped in the start area, experienced a fuel leak, and the team needed to shut off the fuel. Vehicle has been removed from the course.
Vehicle 4 - Team CIMAR - At mile 0.45. Vehicle ran into some wire and got totally wrapped up in it. Vehicle has been disabled.
Vehicle 10 - Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors - Vehicle has been removed from the course - it hit a wall in the start area.
Vehicle 17 - SciAutonics I - At mile 0.75. Vehicle went off the route. After sensors tried unsuccessfully for 90 minutes to reacquire the route, without any movement, vehicle was disabled.
Vehicle 20 - Team TerraMax - Got to mile 1.2. Vehicle then started backing up and after
Vehicle 15 - Team TerraHawk - Withdrew prior to start.
Vehicle 9 - The Golem Group - At mile 5.2. Vehicle stopped. Vehicle had a throttle problem while going up a hill. After trying for 50 minutes, the vehicle was disabled.
Vehicle 16 - The Blue Team - Withdrew prior to start.