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Tom's Looks at Two DARPA Grand Challengers
skeeball writes "As a follow-up to this article, Tom's Hardware has a behind the scenes article on two of the teams competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the first Grand Challenge Project last year, offering a reward of $1 million. This year, the prize money has been doubled, making the competition all the more interesting.""
This just goes to show all the money that is being tossed at defence research. If you can even give the smallest example of how your research can be used for defense you are almost guarenteed to get grant money. I know many researchers who do just that just to get their projects funded.
Voice your opinion!
Thanks for the article link! I love having it at my finger tips here on Slashdot!
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Too bad the submitter didn't Link the Article itself.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Right here.
This year, the prize money has been doubled, making the competition all the more interesting
um, how does more prize money make the competition itself more interesting?
...it would be a MUCH more interesting contest if the teams did better than the last time around. (the best team only got 7 miles out of 175 total.)
I wish the best of luck to all of those competing.I know for a fact that the Hummer pictured is the newer H1ghlander, which CMU acquired after the first race. Their first vehicle, Sandstorm, is an older 1986 military hummer with the top shaved off. Both vehicles will be competing in the upcoming challenge.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Just so all you geeks out there know, the final lineup for the DARPA GC has not been decided yet.
Several teams with extremely competent designs will be site tested by DARPA officials during the week of August 15th.
Keep your eyes on the Princeton University team (disclaimer: I'm heavily involved in developing software and lasers for them). We barely missed the cut in April, but we're gearing up for the second round of qualification tests in August. We've taken an approach very different from the other teams (we love to hate on CMU and Stanford for their bloated budgets and hardware), insofar that we've refused to let our budget rise over $40000. Furthermore, our work is done ENTIRELY by a team of six undergraduates, three of whom are freshmen (I'm the only senior on the team).
Is this a shameless plug for the Princeton team? Hell yeah. But I just felt that it should be known that there are people in this competition who are trying to THINK their way out of the maze instead of BUYING their way out of it.
So we have a line-scanning LIDAR on a tilt head, like CMU, which is an adequate but bulky solution..
We have two industrial Pentium 4 machines running QNX, on our Grand Challenge entry, along with five Galil programmable motor controllers. We have room for 3 CPUs, but the compute load fit on two of them, so we took the third one out.
Technically, QNX was an excellent choice, but because few people know it and many don't want to learn it, using it has made recruiting difficult.
Yah, Tom's Hardware does it again. I guess we'll have to wait for the actual race to see whether or not the big companies will steal the show from the university researchers. Personally I think the teams that have done this on a budget will perform better than the companies that are pouring millions into it. Just because they have to come up with more intelligent solutions.
How we know is more important than what we know.
A long article, full of photos and pointless details, and yet after a dozen pages tell me nothing?
Amazing.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
/* just kidding
Sure, Tom. Give Intel product all the coverage in the world, but what about AMD?
"AMD-powered DARPA Grand Challenge competitor overheats and explodes. Kills millions and incinerates $2 million prize. Intel steps up and offers 2 million Pentium MMX Bunny Man dolls ca 1997 to winning team."
just kidding */
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
"While there should be no misconception that the ultimate goal of DARPA is to turn autonomous vehicles into killing machines"
... should I?
... these people could be doing the exact same research without involving the US military... couldn't they? And, um, I suppose it's possible they could actually not give that research to the US military after they'd perfected it...
Feel I should at least mention the idea that doing really, really cool development for DARPA is the kind of thing you need to ask
Not sure if this is possible w/o yafw (yet another flame war) but someone has to say it
OK, I can see that one way or another if you build it the US military will get it, but it doesn't have to be soooooo, like, readily handed over. Could at least make them ask or something...
closed minded is as closed minded does
My buddies from prep school are in this and if you want to see some whiked pissah video clips (wmv), check this out:
Fully Remote Control:
http://howeandhowe.com/videos/remote.wmv
Adrenaline Junky:
http://howeandhowe.com/videos/Movie_0001.wmv
It never ceases to amaze me what New Englanders can do over an 8 month long wintah!
ummm, I got nothin'
actually, i'm pretty sure that the AC is correct. Searching google (the almighty, the all-powerful), for "The best defense is a good offense" and "The best offense is a good defense" yields 30,400 hits for the former and only 5,340 for the latter. By far, the AC has the most popular of the two phrases. And if you think about it, the same holds true in real life. If you kick someone's ass before they kick yours, they cannot hurt you. Thus you are defended. If you, instead, only defend when attacked, you can never conquer. Thus your attack has failed. As to your other point, these developmnts are completely defense related. The above arguement aside, an autonomuous SUV can as easily be used in Kansas or Arizona as in Iraq. All this is is a car that drives itself. While this is quite a complicated task, having no driver in a car does not suddenly make this an attack only vehicle.
No bastard ever won a war by dieing for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb, bastard die for his.
A couple of corrections:
Two Teams Compete for Best Robot Car in DARPA Challenge
I would just like to point out that the headline is off by over an order of magnitude! We here at Caltech and many other people at many other schools are also competing to have the best robot car too!
The vehicles are given no more than 10 hours to complete the 176-mile route, which will be kept secret until the beginning of the race.
The map is given to each of the teams several (3?) hours prior to the start of the race. One result of this subtle difference is that teams can program a general path into the vehicle and have it deviate from it only as necessary instead of just popping the DVD into the computer and having the computer do everything.
Something that people should keep in mind is that many schools are using the program as a learning experience and solely out to win the competition, but provide their students with not only a limited budget, but make them do things themselves even when it might be cheaper and undoubtedly easier to simply buy premade parts elsewhere. The use to the military will not be the machines that are built with all sorts of fancy equipment and sensors that Tom's Hardware liked to talk about, but the algorithms and techniques that are used to guide the vehicles.
Scott
From Google.com:
the best defense is a good offence: 600,000
the best offence is a good defense: 242,000
I'm surprised the second one give so many in proportion to the first even though it's over 2 to 1, but it's surely because all the words, regardless of order, appear on so many pages. Redoing with quotes:
"the best defense is a good offence" about 1,940
"the best offence is a good defense" "about 91"
Yes, "the best defense is a good offence" wins again, this time by over an order of magnitude.
And watch out, because We Arrogant Americans are more offensive (all puns intended) than ever. Someone knocked down Our Towers, and We're pissed.
Tag lost or not installed.
Tommy, another project for this competition, was featured at the lastest JavaONE in San Francisco in July. You can find the link to the group here.
In addition to some really interesting technology, they've got a great video demonstrating the vehicle in action that drew whoops and applause in their talk at the conference.
-- Scott
Shall we get into this? It doesn't matter if the US military has painted the streets with gold in Iraq. Your military invaded a sovereign nation. The world isn't safer now than it was before the US went and did this, as evidenced by the military build up in the pacific. Your government has shown that it is willing to break international law and other sovereign nations (like North Korea, Taiwan and China) are taking preemptive measures to ensure that your military wont do it again. That puts all of us at risk. The US deployment of nuclear arms to staging positions in South Korea has been condemed by everyone in the region and has resulted in declarations of willingness to use nuclear weapons from all her neighbours. That doesn't make the world a safer place, it makes the world a dangerous war charged place. The kind of place that helps the people who run your country sell the goods that are made by companies they work for. The people of Iraq didn't want your help. They didn't want you to bomb them. They didn't want their system of government removed and replaced with the travesty that you call democracy. Even if your government were just trying to make the world a better place, the ends do not, have not and never will justify the means.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...who will be responsible when someone gets hit by an autonomous vehicle?
I know I could RTFA, but why should I be forced to, just to find out wether I would actually be interested?
This seems to be a recurring pattern on Slashdot posts. Which doesn't make it any better, it just makes it consistent.
Dan.
I have actually talked to one of the handful of DARPA people who hatched this idea in the first place.
Interestingly, the primary motivation for this is for cargo and supply-line applications.
I am not saying that it couldn't be used for ground-based unmanned attack vehicles eventually, clearly it could. Eventually. But that kind of use would require a much smarter and more flexible maneuvering capability.
If you think about the requirements for a supply truck, they are pretty simple. Get from point A to point B, without getting stuck, or running over anyone. Requirements for an autonomous combat vehicle would be orders of magnitude more complex.
If you look at the situation in Iraq, a disproportionate number of people have been killed while driving trucks in supply convoys. It turns out that in the situation we have there truck driving is one of the most dangerous things a soldier can be doing.
Add to this the fact that you have long stretches of flat, uninhabited terrain, and you have a high-payoff "easy" starting point for automating supply vehicles.
As it turns out, about at least 80% of waging war is logistics. Figuring out not only how to get soldiers and equipment to a certain place, but also how to bring all the supporting parts, like food, fuel, ammunition, and establish a supply chain to continually bring more. All while the forces keep moving. In a location where you had no presence just days before, and where you now have forces spread out over hundreds of miles, this can be very difficult.
Automated supply vehicles could do a lot to help in this kind of situation. If you look at how the challenge is set up, it might look a bit similar to the challenges faced by a supply vehicle in Iraq.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."