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?"

Comments

Doubtful

[7Ghent]

Well, considering that the best performer for this year didn't even make 15 miles, I'm hopeful that someone will actually complete the course, but not in under 10 hours.

Re:Doubtful

[wakejagr]

how about an award for getting past the first turn? that first left turn was too much for quite a few of the contestants in the first challenge.

Re:Doubtful

[ciroknight]

I don't doubt it for a minute. Being a Florida Tech freshman in the fall, I want to try to get involved with this project. I've worked on stereo optics systems before using two webcams and I can tell you that this kind of system holds great promise at winning the race. In combination with great laser range-finding and possibly optical range finding (something like us humans do), even acustical systems, a machine has just as good of a chance to pilot a car as it can an aircraft or anything else.

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, and you should be able to navigate around and over them quite easily. The car also plays a key roll; it needs to be adapted into a dune buggy of sorts; huge soft tires and great suspension.
Scary that we're working on this for the government though..

Re:Doubtful

[Jack Porter]

Not sure where you went to school, but IIRC 300 miles in 10 hours is 30 mph.

Re:Doubtful

[rmohr02]

Ohio State had a team that entered this year, and they worked on their entry right next to the workspace of a project team I'm a part of. I heard, albeit secondhand, why most entries didn't work, and the only real reason is that the teams were unfamiliar with the course (e.g., Columbus doesn't exactly have a large desert to test the entry in).

A couple nights before the competition was to take place, it rained on the "course", as it is. Thus, there were many relatively large bushes in the desert when the competition started. This was not something most teams had planned for--however, they did plan for large rocks. Thus, a 9' tall truck would drive up to a (now relatively small) bush, detect it, determine it was a rock, and then try to plot a course around it rather than simply driving through it, which would have worked fine. With the number of bushes that had sprouted up, it was only a matter of time before a truck's computer got swamped trying to avoid all of the "rocks".

I look forward to hearing about next year's competition, for which I'm sure teams will think to find a way of differentiating a bush and a rock.

Re:Doubtful

[Nugget]

At first I thought that this post represented a new slashdot low (Math is hard, let's go shopping!) but then I noticed that the damn thing has been upmodded twice.

JPriest may just be having a caffeine-free day, but who are the two jagfucks who thought this was interesting and insightful?

Short answer ...

[Manip]

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.

Re:Short answer ...

[Waffle Iron]

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.

It's not about winning...

[Wiser87]

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.

Going out on a limb...

[DocJohn]

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.

Short answer...

[sinner0423]

No. Last time a good 30%, I believe, didn't even make it out the gate. I seriously doubt any of them will "win". Well, I'm sure they're all winners, like in the special olympics, but i don't think they will FINISH the course.

With the closed nature of the competition, no.

[dexterpexter]

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)

Highly doubtful

[OblongPlatypus]

According to the May issue of Wired, the best team got through only 7.4 of those 100 miles before breaking down. There are some funny quotes in the Wired article, showing just how miserably far away we are from true autonomy:

What went wrong: "Lost GPS signal. Forgot there was a mountain between it and next checkpoint. Tried to drive through mountain."

Lesson learned: "Go around mountains, not through them."

What went wrong: "Interpreted small bushes as enormous rocks and repeatedly backed away from them."

Lesson learned: "Get new sensors that can distinguish between bush and rock."

This all sounds pretty pathetic, but having just completed a master-level course in artificial intelligence, I suddenly understand just how difficult some of these issues are to solve. Let's face it: We won't see anything even approaching true autonomy in anything but tightly controlled environments for years to come.

I conclude with the best quote; not really AI-related, but still simply hilarious:

What went wrong: "On-off switch located on side of vehicle. Bumped into a wall on way out of start area. Turned self off."

Lesson learned: "Put the on-off switch somewhere else."

It might happen...

[sgtsanity]

BTW, for all those interested, Wired ran a list of what went wrong for each team. It reads very comically, but a lot of these things are very "DUH!" after you've gone through the first time. I forsee a lot better results, as teams will have that much more practice. Hopefully some will come up with some more general solutions, rather than brute-force processing the terrain around the known area of the route.

Slashdot entry

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely with all the talent on Slashdot, we could create a winning entry?

Name suggestion: The Autonomous Coward

Most of them will never work

[Animats]

With the possible exception of CMU, nobody had a system that could avoid a ditch or a pothole. Stereo vision won't do a good enough job on dirt for long range ditch/pothole detection. All the laser rangefinders except CMU's were fixed line scanners, so they couldn't possibly profile the ground ahead reliably from a bouncing vehicle.

CMU's approach is a big hammer. They took a stock line-scanning laser rangefinder and put it in a huge 3-axis gimbal, which they then actively stabilize. That should be able to profile terrain, but it's a huge mechanical kludge. If you miss a spot because you hit a bump, you have a hole in your data. At that point you can either slow down and rescan, or plow ahead blindly. They may eventually complete the course with that rig, but no way is it a commercially viable technology.

The next generation of sensor technology may be ready in time. There are at least three groups with usable sensors in the prototype stage. We're talking to two of them. But that's all I'm going to say for now.

John Nagle / Team Overbot.

(We're recruiting. See our jobs page. No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize, we cover all expenses. Silicon Valley only. We have our own shop in an industrial park in Redwood City. If you're local, come over and see the thing.)

There is a rule against damaging the terrain

[dexterpexter]

The only problem I could see with this is that driving through things was not seen as an acceptable solution by DARPA. It stipulated that the terrain and obstacles must be left unharmed. I think there are reasonable allowances made, such as running through "weeds" and leaving faint tire tracks.

Sending a bulldozer through something, however, would likely cause harm.

The motive behind this, if I get to guess, is that they are looking for a more covert vehicle. Something that has torn through the terrain and left chaos in its wake is more likely to be tracked/disabled than something that can quickly and nimbly navigate across the terrain.

I think that your idea is a fine idea, though. If they are looking at application for war situations and covert navigation is not an issue, I think that you are onto something.

When I first heard about the competition, that was my first reaction, too. Why not just create a tank and plow through the terrain along the most direct route? A review of the rules showed that they had already taken into consideration this solution and created a rule against it. I can see their reasoning, though.