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."

Comments

Arguably the worst name ever for a product...

[Static-MT]

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!

Re:Arguably the worst name ever for a product...

[Fahrvergnuugen]

"twa - reg" or "tour - eg" are both acceptable. It was named after a desert dwelling african tribe which is known for its versatility and ability to cope with harsh environments.

I personally liked the wind theme they had going on with Golf, Jetta & Corrado

Princeton

[Adrilla]

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.

The worlds most boring race

[pudding7]

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.

Re:Hummer went 200 miles without a problem...

[DigiShaman]

Ya, they used a refueling drone that always hovered above it. In fact, now they just leave it attached...and maybe even controlling the Humvee.

Too Bad

[techsoldaten]

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.

All Mac solution

[no_opinion]

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.

More info

[heli0]

http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20050713/index.ht ml

Good article about the Stanford and Cyberrider teams, with video.

The project is based on a partnership of several companies. Volkswagen provides the vehicle, a diesel-based Touareg R5 TDI with an automatic transmission, and the automotive know-how. Intel is supplying the Pentium-M chips (Dothan core) as well as the platform consisting of several 855GM-based mini-ATX boards. Then there is MDV (Mohr Davidow), a company that invests in start-up firms. Android, Honeywell, Tyzx and Coverity are among the other sponsors. Tyzx has specialized in image recognition software, which is especially important for AI (artificial intelligence) systems.

It goes without saying that the power hungry P4 processors and the corresponding platform would have made a bad choice. After all, the power dissipation loss of these seven systems would easily have exceeded 1200 Watts! This would have required special modifications to be made to the alternator and several other components. Instead, Intel has supplied the project with its tried and tested Pentium M notebook processors. These use the Dothan core with its 2MB of cache, are clocked at 1.6GHz and run on an 855GM platform. As a result, the overall power requirements of all seven systems together are only 280 Watts. The individual nodes are linked using a Gigabit Ethernet network.