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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."
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
What does it mean when someone says they ran "last year's course" without a problem?
Does the car take to the road knowing nothing of the obstacles ahead or has it been programmed to avoid the hazards revealed in a year's study of the route?
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.
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
I don't think you're paranoid -- I think you're ignorant.
Last I looked, the ratio of support personnel to fighting personnel was something like 7:1 in the modern military. That means that for every person whose primary job is actually killing people, there are seven people whose primary job involves support functions. One of the big support functions is "get this stuff from point A to point B."
While sometimes "get supplies from point A to point B" can be rather hazardous -- our supply units in Iraq can talk about that -- it can also quite often be boring, repetitive, and relatively safe. Being able to send supplies to the front lines without having to equip a truck with people will help alleviate this need.
The DoD spends many billions of dollars on research every year. The really sexy research -- "how do we kill people better, faster, and in more bulk?" -- gets the most coverage, but a very significant chunk of their research is around things that are not directly related to the whole "kill or be kill" thing -- for example, the internet.
Hope they have code to fix breakdowns.. Poor volkswagon.. a check of consumer reports and the '04 Toureg gets a predicted reliability of Solid Black (poor for those who don't read CS). But good owner satisfaction (white circle). A Ford Exploder comes out as good reliability (White circle) and fair owner satisfaction (dark half circle). A Toyota 4 Runner on the other hand has Very good Reliabiity (red half circle) and excellent Owner Satisfaction (filled red circle)