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Will There Be A Winning Autonomous Robot in 2005?
An anonymous reader submits "This summer is heating up the
DARPA Grand Challenge as multiple top notch schools begin to announce their
entry into the competition. The newest organization to announce its entry was
the
Florida Institute of Technology. Their project is known as
Oasis - Autonomous Racing, and they have a team of over 45 students,
professors, and advisors that are currently hard at work designing their vehicle
and raising funds to pay for it. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a race between
vehicles that should be designed to travel up to 300 miles in less than 10 hours
through the desert or other harsh medium without any human interaction. The
2005 competition has a $2 million grand prize as authorized by congress. With
all of the new entrants does anyone think that the competition will be won the
second time around?"
No.
I don't think anyone will win this time around. The problem is that the current technology can't deal with unknown situations/objects, maybe in a controlled enviroment with selected things added and removed but in a desert there is very little chance. If someone does win it will be more down to luck than actual computing power.
The whole point of the race is to see how well non-government groups solve these problems and to gain new insight on how to use technology.
Just getting something that works makes them winners.
I know we're going to hear mostly naysayers here, saying "Well, gee, they couldn't even make it 15 miles this year, what's the chance of anyone actually winning in a year's time!?"
I think there's a good possibility that someone can win it. Think about it. This past year, none of the teams had any first-hand, direct experience with this course or the challenge. So now every team has all of the experience and data from this year's challenge, and could not only see what went wrong with their team's entry, but the problems faced by every other team (motorcycle entry notwithstanding).
I think the computing power is there. If the teams learned anything from this year, it should be that GPS isn't sufficient in and of itself. You need to far more creative. Every system should have 2 or 3 redundant subsystems.
I think it can be done, and I think there are enough creative people working on the problem that it wouldn't surprise me to see a winner next year.
Considering this is not a paved road (or even a path to follow) this task might be difficult for even many human drivers without the right vehicle.
I hope the new contestants learn a great deal from last years challenge.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
If the prior entrants are any indication, than no. Those entrants shows just how unprepared they were. As a engineering student on a team that has built/is building an autonomous robot (not associated with DARPA), my evaluation of the vehicle designs left me terribly disappointed. In fact, part of me things my own team could have thrown our present navigation hardware/software onto an ATV and been more competitive than the other DARPA entrants. In fact, had DARPA not been so selective in their choosing of robots to enter the competition (which, in my opinion went against the spirit of an open competition), we might have done just that.
A few responders have said that the technology just isn't there for autonomous navigation. I disagree. It just needs to be refined. Robots for the IGVC can navigate unknown environments respectably, and these are unfunded, poorly staffed projects ran by undergraduate students.
I believe that the next competition's entrants will make it much further than this years, but looking at the stock, similar designs that DARPA let through, looking at bells and whistles rather than creativity, my hopes are not high for having a winner. They need to re-evaluate the meaning behind an "open" competition of ingenuity and consider that the most expensive, technologically-advanced robot is not always the answer.
Look at the first year IGVC. Colleges spent thousands of dollars on big, relatively the same robots and the University of Tulsa came in with a PC bungeed to a child's car and beat them all. I don't pretend that the IGVC robots are competitive against the Grand Challenge ones, but the point is still the same: make it an open competition, and perhaps we might see some *real* ingenuity and then, in the future, a winner.
Money d.n.e. ingenuity
That said, I tip my hat to the previous entrants. How neat is this competition!? (even with its limitations)
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
to hide a Little Person inside one of these things? Baron Kempelen got away with such a scheme for quite a while... The Turk
The technology certainly does exist to achieve it. However from a project point of view the limits are the 2million and 1 year to do it.
If you were to have 3 to 5 years, 20 programmers, say 6 electronic engineers and a few mechnical engineers i think It would be rather easy. I dont mean grad students either, I mean people with 5 to 10 years and a few seniors from relevant fields. Of coarse this isnt going to happen for 2million and management of a team this size would require integration time of around at least3 to 5 years I would say. Identification of obsticals is not a problem, thats fairly ruitine software project-yes it requires the engineering approach there is always a way. Path generation is fairly ruitine. However the practical engineering issues are not expecially under budget and time frame. The second issue is breaking down the project into managable chunks for each person and that is where the project result would reflect the cleverness of the seniors.
greg
That's the perfect example of something that's easy for humans and hard for robots. It's one thing to detect the presence of obstacles. It's another to identify obstacles and determine their risk to vehicular progress. We know oil is black, shiny and slippery. We know rocks usually look jagged and the color of dirt, and they're hard when you run into them. We know that it's a long way down if you fall over a cliff ledge. If there's a cliff wall going up on one side of the road and down the other side of the road, we know that falling off the cliff is much more dangerous than hitting the side of the mountain, at least at low speeds. It's common sense things like this that humans just know, and it's hard to program every possible scenario into an AI.
Try finding the edges in a bush or a clump of tumbleweed...
Ummm, those bushes don't spring up overnight. Not to more than a couple of inches, anyway. Nevertheless, since there was some sort of "roadway" for the entire length of the route, there was really no need to distinguish between rocks and bushes. If your vehicle was intended to steer around a 2" rock, then you had made a fatal mistake before leaving the gate.
I really like this sort of competition but I have a couple of concerns.
First, it's not open to everyone because you have to be an american citizen to enter (not 100% sure about this). If this is the case then the DARPA Challenge will not harness the full power that it was originally design for, which was to build the best possible intelligent robot for the task at hand. If you eliminate 95% of the worlds population from the competition then probably you've missed out on a good amount of innovation and ideas that could have helped your ultimate goal.
Second, should we the scientists of the world be helping the military build weapons. I know this is a cute rover type contest but if you mount a weapon on these puppies you've got a very scary scenario involving many innocent people getting killed or used and controlled (Terminator/Matrix movies). It isn't always a good idea to make something just because we can.