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Grand Challenge Videos Posted
awtbfb writes "For those readers not fortunate enough to watch the satellite feed on the day of the race, videos of the Grand Challenge have been quietly posted on the race site. These include official AVI and DVD compilations and unedited clips in Quicktime MP4. The compilations also include some footage from the chase helicopters. Feel free to yell 'No! Turn right! Your other right!' as you watch these."
Gotta love DARPA. They brought us stealth technology, GPS, and ofcourse the Internet! It's good to see them promote some technology within the country. Seems like since the 80's (?) everything with a plug or batteries has come from elsewhere
Oh great, now no-one will get it. If someone by some miracle actually gets the DVD downloaded before it's /.'d or taken down by the site, can they PLEASE post a torrent?
Life is but a mist upon the horizon.
um 1.4GB for the dvd quality version. Can anyone say server suicide and bandwidth bill from hell
I Don't Work Here
friggin trolls. go back under your bridge
TechTV has a summary of all the teams, as well as some streaming video.
Don't forget these edited video excerpts hosted at tamu -- good stuff. 9 or 31 MB, 19 minutes. Annoying beep tone at the beginning, but it doesn't last too long (just longer than you'd want)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
...is the slashdot effect.
webpage
WOW, what a sales pitch, what does daylight savings do? it keeps your kids from standing around in the AM dark, and SPEEDS UP YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION..
sounds like something netzero would use....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think so!
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Instead of wasting my tax dollars on terabyte upon terabyte of bandwidth, they should have used BitTorrent to distribute these files; that's what it's designed for! Then, the money they save on bandwidth (by shifting it to my normally UNUSED and "unlimited" bandwidth) can be used more productively.
And don't give me the line about bittorrent being "hard" to setup, because 1) it's not, and 2) the type of people downloading these videos are slightly more technically inclined than Joe Average anyway.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Daimler Chrysler has an active research program in the area of AGVs. These things are further a long than most people realize. There's a pdf article about the state of this research here
Meh, the mods seem to be a tad slow tonight.
:P
Gotta mod down all the crap that Anti-Slash links for all their dupe accounts to mod up
doesn't even have 1.4 GB of memory. Isn't that sad? Guess i'm goona have to sit out this one!
WoW: Scheod 70 orc warlock on Shadowmoon
Slashdotting in progress.
Use my mirror. Some files aren't fully downloaded, but will be in about ten minutes. I'm posting this now because Slashdotting is in progress.
I'm mirroring:
|/usr/games/fortune
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Has anyone ever given thought to setting up a BitTorrent tracker for /.? Then whenever a story referencing large downloads is posted, (say, anything >10MB, perhaps) either Slashdot editors can actually seed the torrent, or just some /.er out there with something fatter than my POS 21.6Kbps modem connection.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
messing around with DARPA...
rm -rf ~/*
Don't worry - I'm sure Saudia Arabia will air-drop some food and water.
While I was busy fr1st ps0ting, I couold have gotten the jump on these downloads...
Very carefully.
Of course, not having a driver helps.
From what one of the Red Team guys told us afterwards, they were one meter to the left of whatever the GPS signal said. So naturally it hit EVERY obstacle on the way up there. The funny thing is that they couldn't decide if was because of them crashing it or if the GPS signal was screwed (I'll go for the crashing story).
Then it fell into a ditch well outside of the town of Dagget (a great vacation spot if you plan on killing yourself), where I was WAITING, with a tiny little radio. Apparently it freaked out because it was stuck, and it started going back and forth. It kept doing that until the tires literally caught on fire. I think they blew up some bearings or gears or something else related to the axles/differentials. We were 21 miles out on the "race course", so you can imagine my despair of it not getting there...
I was hoping they would come over by me. Right before my position they were supposed to go off the highway (they would have been on Route 66 at this point) and then they would have gone under a concrete railway underpass.
A few things people were wondering:
1. Would they make it that far? No.
2. IF they got there, will going under this railway underpass, lined with concrete and who-knows-what kind of metal, would the signal get lost?
3. Do you thing a freight train running over over that bridge every 10 minutes might screw something up?
4. If they got it past the underpass, will it hit that pretty natural gas meter station directly after that or will it turn right like it's supposed to!
Oh, well. I had fun anyway...
Next year they plan on having it again. And the prize is supposed to be 2 million dollars.
Since the site is down, I'll give a quick recap:
They all lost.
Red Team 10:30 AM (Shot from the Start Line)
Red Team 10:30 AM (Shot from the Finish Line
How in the heck do you get shots from the finish line if no one finished??
One of the things that DARPA told the entrants was that they could not depend on the GPS signal to be receivable at all locations along the course. Any vehicle that was depending only on the signal was doomed to fail. The vehicles would need to be able to determine their positions and proper course using other sensors as well.
I just let one rip for six...
Damn I saw this the other day, now it's prolly slashdotted for the downloads. Teaches me to wait.
For the record, the CMU team was assisted by the Dashwerks DashPC project ([ironically] seen earlier today here on Slashdot.
Dashwerks has provided advice, notes, and exclusive IP to [at least one] member of the CMU DARPA team members for the past year or so.
It's very fulfilling to see underdog project(s) such as these in the spotlight and taking a lead position in their respective industries.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm really surprised no one modded this troll. What's up mods?
This would be real nice because then pages wouldn't be slashdot'd so much. The more people downloading it, the more availible it is.
Maybe a Mozilla pluggin.
I use my middle finger. Is there another way to do it? =)
Big spatula. Or use a C-141 Starlifter.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I'm tellin' ya... People's perversions never sease to amaze me. Ought to be laws!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Create a web server in the California desert which handles high amounts of web traffic.
There are some good videos of the motorcycle entry here.
GC BitTorrent Hope this works...
Talk about a waste of time, money, resources, etc.....
Hey, I'm pretty sure I could do a good job designing the control system for an automated vehicle like this. Are any of the teams (pref in Southern California) looking for somebody with an idea for a design, and the ability to build most of it?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Can someone please send a pigeon over to DARPA to pick up a copy of the DVD image and bring it back ? Then we can get on with torrenting it.
On the other hand - it's going to take me 35 hours to download @ 10kb/sec, but thats still faster than flying in a 767 from here (Melbourne, Australia) to DARPA and back!
-- Game Development Blog
I don't know if it's done, but perhaps DARPA should give these vehicles access to the more precise military GPS system.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
45 Seconds of the colorbars with 1000Hz tone. It is 5% of the total video length, calibration can be done in 15s-30s and this is compressed to hell anyhow. Oh well. I guess I have survived nonetheless. -k
I have a BS in BS.
It was before 2000 that some noise was intentionally introduced for civil applications. Now they're same
maybe this was the "lowlights" video, but really, what a waste of time.
some cars follow gps. badly.
although a motorbike did fall over. that was great.
My real complaint is about the terrible comentator. Yes mate, i'm sure "those folks in the middle east" would drop their weapons and flee when a 5mph car making a loud beeping noise drives towards them then falls into a ditch.
pathetic.
There are tons of Grand Challenge projects going on in science and engineering. One of them I was on finished in 1996. So saying "Grand Challenge" doesn't exactly tell us which one. Sure, we can read further.... but why not add to the header WHICH Grand Challenge you're referring to? Just a friendly suggestion.
videos of the Grand Challenge have been quietly posted on the race site.
It's not quiet anymore, the site has been slashdotted. Even the google cache isn't promptly showing the page.
Exactly. And they weren't supposed to rely only upon GPS because it might be intermittent, but because DARPA gave them only *waypoints*, locations they were required to pass close to, as opposed to a complete route! The waypoints were only supposed to be numerous enough to plot a general path across the desert, but not NEARLY enough to guide every foot of the vehicles' travel. The vehicle's sensors need to be good enough that a clear path can be computed. What if there's 300 meters of lazily winding road, with a big pile of rocks on one side, and a dropoff on the other, between where you and the next waypoint? So you have to wonder what the Red Team member meant by "we were within one meter of GPS". At best, it's a red herring. At worst, he didn't know what he was talking about.
The TerraMax video, where it rams the mini-van repeatedly, is very funny.
Haha, I finally managed to find a place to get the DVD zip. Here is the torrent for it. If you have downloaded part of it or all of it, then you can help seed. Too bad we couldn't have had this when the intial slashdotting took out the server.
Thanks, but if you're not going to see for longer than a day, there's not much point. I just tried to download from your tracker and there are no seeds.
Of course, there are no peers either, so perhaps everyone had the same problem as me (or it just isnt popular).
I believe the red team was using extremely high-resolution elevation data and pictures of the race area for path planning. So they might have computed more in-between waypoints based on this data and used GPS to travel between them, with cameras and rangefinders and stuff on-board mostly for random obstacle avoidance. That would explain the team member's comments. Also it's possible that the course started out easy with many GPS waypoints and got harder later on with more path planning necessary. Since no bot traveled more than 7 miles I doubt any would have gotten to the hard section.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Am I the only one that recognizes satire around here? It's funny, laugh.
When are people going to realize that TCP-connection based information serving doesn't scale? HTTP, BitTorrent, neither of them stand a chance against a huge number of clients.
This is a job for IP Multicast. Set up "broadcasters" (actually multicasters, obviously) pushing out the data on a fixed schedule, the way video-on-demand (yet another misnomer) works. Use trackers to allow clients to find a multicast group carrying the feed they want at a speed close to their line speed, with a start-time within a particular window around "now". Presto, each information provider only needs to transmit a small number of copies of the data, instead of one copy per requesting client. Overall Internet bandwidth requirements decrease, while everybody gets the data they're looking for at best possible speed.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...