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Will There Be A Winning Autonomous Robot in 2005?

Posted by timothy on from the time-for-a-darpa-change dept.

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?"

11 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Short answer ... by Manip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Short answer ... by ejaw5 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think if you do a bit of research, you can find microcontrollers and the sensors needed to accomplish the task. Not to simplify the Grand Challenge, the objective is to have a vehicle traverse through a desert terrain while avoiding other vehicles and obstacles. Given enough time, any good electrical enginnering student(s) can come up with some good ideas on solution with some possible hardware choices.

      The Challenge to DARPA isn't the technology, but the testing phase, or lack there of. How many of the schools who participated last year had practical access to a desert of similar circumstance? (I'm in north Florida and I can't think of a place) You can put together an autonomous vehicle for the competition, and maybe test it in a large open field with some 'simulated' obstacles but won't come close to the real deal.

      Another thing is 300+ miles might be pushing the limit for how far gasoline vehicles (especially the trucks and SUVs) can travel on one tank of fuel. Keeping in mind that there would most likely be frequent go and brake driving, if any vehicle were to make it across the finish line the fuel gauge would be below the slash.

      --

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    2. Re:Short answer ... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

      What it boils down to is that there's something horribly wrong with the current approach to "AI". Nature solves problems very similar to this with a totally different approach. Take a cockroach for example. Its task is probably much harder than this "grand challenge". It must survive in the world for several weeks or months while: finding its own fuel, avoiding hostile predators, finding a suitable mate, and include a control system that supports walking in any orientation along with controlled flight through the air.

      What computing horsepower drives this task? A few milligrams of wet neurons that probably consume a few microwatts.

      Even if a cockroach weren't up to driving one of these vehicles through the desert, any small bird probably has enough signal processing power to handle the chore. They certainly are able to handle flying through a thicket of tree branches, a pretty tough challenge in itself. How much does a house finch brain and vision system weigh? Maybe 1 gram?

      Back in the 80s I majored in AI briefly, and I quickly came to the conclusion that the incredible pattern matching abilities of living organisms can't be effectively modeled by piping numbers through a single accumulator register. The highly interconnected architecture of a brain is totally different. (Many of my professors seemed to think that they had some deep secret insight to "intelligence" because they were hacking in Lisp. What was really happening was that they were caught up in their own cleverness in using recursion and macros to create layers of abstraction. But that's just tricky discreet math, not self-awareness.)

      Now that computers are 1000X faster, my assessment is still valid. In fact, computers probably aren't even nearly 1000X faster at the algorithms that living organisms use to deal with the real world, because all of the computer speed tricks rely on locality of reference (caches). A brain, OTOH, is a fully associative processor that can compare an large chunk of input with a good amount of its entire memory in a single atomic operation. Its power comes from not having locality of reference.

      IMHO, attempts at these kinds of projects are always going to result in clumsy, kludgy, stupid machines until some totally new approaches are developed for processing and information retrieval.

    3. Re:Short answer ... by Wog · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And these design differences, my friend, are what seperate the mind of man from the mind of God.

      Burn, karma, burn!

  2. It's not about winning... by Wiser87 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Going out on a limb... by DocJohn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. With the closed nature of the competition, no. by dexterpexter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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  5. How hard would it be... by JawnV6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    to hide a Little Person inside one of these things? Baron Kempelen got away with such a scheme for quite a while... The Turk

  6. Re:Doubtful by homer_ca · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Doubtful by Quixote · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Another thing: use the 2d images to build a 3d map on the fly, approximenting object sizes by finding the edges of the object in the pictures,

    Try finding the edges in a bush or a clump of tumbleweed...

  8. Re:Doubtful by murmurr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.