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DARPA Grand Challenge A Real Race At Last?
museumpeace writes "News.com has posted its second story in a week on a hopeful Grand Challenge contender. Stanford's Stanley, a VW Touareg run by 100,000 lines of code can hit 40 mph and has now traversed all but 3 miles of last year's desert course without problems. A few days earlier, Carnegie Mellon University's Team Red announced that its Sandstorm, a modified Hummer, had run 200 miles without any problems though on a closed track. DARPA cut the field to 40 in June and will cut it to 20 before the race in October."
I wish my girlfriend could drive 200 miles without crashing into something. Perhaps theres a trade in programme or something?
Beep beep.
It's spelled Touareg. Could VW have come up with a more confusing name for its premium 'ute? I still don't know how to say it!
Was it refueled on the fly?
How many miles per line of code?
A guy from princeton made some posts claiming that his team had run the entire course and then some last night. They can be found in this thread ps: they haven't made the final roster yet.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
is that to be impressive?? if it was like 500 i would be WOW even say 5000 but 100000. is that jsut the main driver or is that each part sumed.. and when do we get to read the doc it should be intresting // this line was added after it saw the tele pole as a lane line
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I was out at California Speedway last year when they were practicing/qualifying or whatever.
Boring as hell. Interesting, but very tedious.
Machine moves 10 feet, stops.
Moves 5 feet, stops.
Moves 40 feet, stops.
Turns 10 degrees.
Turns 15 degrees.
Moves 10 feet, stops.
Hopefully they've picked up the pace a bit. Otherwise they'll never go 200 miles through the open desert in the alloted time.
I'll bet the teams from Harverd, Berkely and NIT are quaking in their boots.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This is, after all, funded by DARPA so I wonder what creepy guys are drooling over the results in the shadows?
.50 caliber machine guns on the vehicle.
/.'ers can think of some positive applications, I'd like to hear some ideas.
Myabe some will be rejected from the competition because there is no possible way to mount
Now of course there are practical applications to this too, like an ambulance that can really haul ass and save lives, or a taxi that will take the most direct route. A pizza wagon that can bake and deliver tasty eats. I am sure other
But I'm scared of a technology like this being used against people...maybe I'm paranoid (the voices say I'm not).
In fact, this could be a whole new brand of reality show: a few dozen death row inmates are released, followed minutes later by "smart cars with guns" that chase them down. Last inmate alive gets a pardon.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
run by 100000 lines of code
Wow. A car that runs on computer code instead of gas? That's great! Now I can program myself home.
(Wonder how I'll pay attention to the road while I write code though....)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Try navigating rush hour traffic...now that would be a trick. Could have a robotic hand for giving someone the bird....just a thought!
Indecision may, or may not be my problem! -- Jimmy Buffett
VW must love the publicity. First they set a world record and now this. If they beat a Hummer I'll bet the sales & marketing dept will have a field day !
20? What are the elimination criteria for the vehicles DARPA's simply not going to let compete?
Specifically, if no one has ever done this successfully before, how the heck do they know what a successful approach looks like?
I understand dropping the obvious non-starters - teams whose vehicles crash or get lost on a small test course, or teams whose vehicles are not ready to go at all - both of these are valid rejection criteria.
But it seems really silly to set an abitrary number at "exactly 20"; the article doesn't really explain how the decision on whether or not your vehicle "makes the cut", other than "was evaluated by DARPA experts" - who have yet to solve the problem themselves.
-- Terry
Herbie!
I
the "news" articles i pasted together to make this post were, in part, PR for two of the better funded competitors...they WANT to pique interest and get publicity for the event. A few disclosures that a sponsored vehicle has demonstrated a capacity to do what none of the entrants did last year is sort of infomercial. If the race were more like real racing [would NASCAR be an example?] the teams would keep mum about what they were capable of to throw off the odds makers. I think the smartest comments I have seen so far in this or the post of Tom's hardware writeup on DARPA G. C. has been about what a huge bargain DARPA is getting for its 2 million: Real defense contracts only get a few bidders and they want money up front to produce demo's of the systems they sell. anyway, I just think its cool toys,
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
But seriously, I beleive those vehicles that could not complete a closed obstacle course were eliminated. It has occured to you that autonomous vehicles do present a huge safety hazard (especially those with a 200-mile range), therefore they can't let just anybody participate in this, hasn't it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Perhaps 20 is the most the course can handle w/o too much clutter at the start from broken down rigs? As I recall last year the first mile or so there were a lot of dropouts. Maybe there are only 20 judges, one for each vehicle to make sure no one cheats? Of course seeing as this IS the Government the number 20 probably came from on high and it is 20 because "we say so".
Take any unprotected Windows boxen and a decompiler and voila! Fuel with minimal work. Hey, now we have cross industrial uses for honeypots!
#define CLUE 0
I think it's too bad we can construct a rover that can charge around the landscape of Mars for months at a time but cannot get a Taureg or a Hummer to drive through the desert on it's own.
Different disciplines, I know, but still. It would just seem like someone should be able to put something together that could overcome any obstacle and proceed in a straight line from point to point in the race. Like a Bradley tank, maybe with some modifications that exchange armor for nitrous tanks or something.
I realize that's not really the point of the race, but still. What about a ballistic vehicle instead? Like an egg drop that just has to hit the target, maybe with some means of propulsion to correct it's course in flight. It could complete the track in minutes instead of hours.
It just fails to amaze me that we are trying to get trucks to drive on their own when we have perfectly good rockets that can do the job much faster.
- Werner vB.
How many lines of code per libraries of congress?
>a VW Taureg
it's called "Touareg"
it's not even a german word so there is no reason to spell it that wrong
http://www.vw.com/touareg/index.html
It's easy for DARPA to eliminate the ones that will fail. Any team running on a Windows system is removed from competition.
Every time you call tech support, a little kitten dies.
That'd be sooo awesome. It could be like that old Apple 2e AutoAssault game. Or maybe it'd be more like Road Rash.
Or unreels, as the case may be.
-Standferd graduate
I was part of a team at my UK university that built a robot inspired by the Darpa Grand Challenge. We ran off battery power and theorised we could go for 5-6 hours on twin 16Ah lead acid batteries. We moved at a steady fast walk so unscientifically we moved at 3mph... so maybe we could have covered 18 miles on the batteries we carried. We didn't look into fuel power because of the low budget we had, £1,500 rather than the 10's of thousands in the Darpa teams budgets.
t ion=image&gallery=MEng%20Robot%20-%20Henry&dir=pho tos/MEng%20Robot%20-%20Henry&filename=midweek.jpg.
Here's a picture from our local paper http://www.etingley.com/photogallery/index.php?ac
My team happened to win our challenge, but we used GPS navigation, Ultrasonic transceivers for avoidance and a full mini ITX XP box to control the robot. Oh, and a snazzy case to make sure we got into the paper!
It's a good challenge to emulate, all of us in the 4 teams learnt a lot about robot control and team work.
-
Warfire
If these contestants realize that the winning robot will pretty much go straight into military R&D. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It just smacks of "Real Genius". If a robot could do this out on the battle field, we could save a lot of lives just in ambulance roles alone. Other applications abound, but just think of it... just in an automated ambulance roll... the robot rushes in, get's loaded up with casualties, races back to the field hospital, all without concern for enemy fire. That alone justifies all the effort. /Still waiting for all that popcorn.
MadOgre.com
a VW Taureg run by 100000 lines of code can hit 40 mph
How much lines of code can it transmit when loaded with tapes and speeding down the highway?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The principle challenge here is effective navigation of difficult terrain. The Mars rovers are extremely slow, manually driven, (albeit by extreme time delay), and it takes a *lot* of skilled people to keep one going. If autonomous vehicle technology is significantly improved, then the effect on the the mars exploration program would be vast. And actually the desert scenario is pretty close to the problems found on mars: Sandstorms rocks sand more sand holes Imagine Mars being explored with ten (or more) completelly autonomous and robust vehicles scooting around looking for interesting features. That would rock.
How long will it take for Foster-Miller to implement the software from whatever team wins this thing into their Talon system...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
There was an old game (for 286, with horrible polygon graphics) called DeathTrack - which featured car racing where you also fought with your competitors, upgrading armor and defense as well as buying missiles, lasers etc. by winning/placing high in races.
I also remember some movie that had a similar premise - from an imdb search, I think its Cannonball.
Only difference is that here we're talking about automated cars, a la Robocop (Robocar?) instead of having human drivers.
A friend of mine is captain of Team Banzai, and they're building the car's brains out of Macs and using iSight cameras for vision. The car is a VW Touareg.
Good article about the Stanford and Cyberrider teams, with video.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
good thing it's not written in "karel the robot", a simplified logo-like language. That language has no turn right command, so you have to define it as three 90 degree left turns.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
It's Stanford. no D in the middle. DUH
run by 100000 lines of code
Can I have that number in standard Libraries of Congress units, please?
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
The Touaregs are an ethnic group who follow a semi-nomadic lifestyle in the Sahara and Sahel.
I just hope it wasn't the first three miles.
Would it rock? Or just find lots of rocks?
I've had mods go up and down from +5 to -1 several times within minutes. This is part of the game called Slashdot. The system isn't broken. Just a fact of life. Some people don't want to hear what you want to say, others love what you ahve to say. Get over it.
I was working on a project Life in the Atacama whose goal was to do exacty that. The idea was to have scientists pick out waypoints which may be of interest but the robot can vear off and make decisions on locations that are of interest.
If you want to see some cool videos and read more about the actual design of the CMU entries (Sandstorm and H1ghlander) check out their website. The race log section is especially interesting.
Yawn.
Is this story written by an idiot? Or did he need to stick a few more words in there to make it longer? Or is this some sort of Intel sponsored text-based product-placement?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So, have the guys that made Forza entered in this contest? Seems like they'd just ROAST all the other teams! Screw that 40 mph entry. I'm thinkin' more like powersliding at 110mph around a gravel road turn!!! Woot!
DARPA provides money to the 20.
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Finally. Let's make it an Olympic sport and then dance on De Coubertin's Grave in our army boots!
Why, it seems like just yesterday I was telling someone something similar.
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."
And the software now uses machine-learning technology to program the car to "remember" how it's first driven over a course manually, and then emulate those actions for autonomous driving.
First a human drives the course and then the software replays the actions of the human? Yes, the software makes corrections along the way but this defeats the purpose of the competition, i.e. the car autonomously navigating by itself over unknown terrain. Sounds dangerously close to a disqualification to me (if I were a competing team, I'd be sure to at least complain)...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Does anyone know of any free software projects to create an autonomous car?
It seems to me that something like this needs a lot of people tinkering with it before we really get anywhere. It's sort of like the early days of flying.
Have any of these 20+ teams released their source code? It seems like that would be a good place to start...