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

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.

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.

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."

Slashdot entry

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Name suggestion: The Autonomous Coward