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DARPA Grand Challenge A Real Race At Last?

Posted by Zonk on from the flat-out dept.

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."

6 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Arguably the worst name ever for a product... by Hays · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I agree. And the commercials making fun of the name made it even worse! They had 20 different people guessing how to pronounce it, and then at the very end the announce said it correctly. But I sure as heck can't remember which one is correct after being bombarded with 20 mispronounciations.

  2. Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer! by SmartyFartBlast · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is, after all, funded by DARPA so I wonder what creepy guys are drooling over the results in the shadows?

    Myabe some will be rejected from the competition because there is no possible way to mount .50 caliber machine guns on the vehicle.

    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 /.'ers can think of some positive applications, I'd like to hear some ideas.

    But I'm scared of a technology like this being used against people...maybe I'm paranoid (the voices say I'm not).

    1. Re:Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer! by Locke2005 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      a taxi that will take the most direct route You've obviously never driven a taxi. Taking the most direct route results in the lowest fares! Experienced taxi drivers learn to quickly spot out-of-towners, then take the most roundabout route possible, thereby maximize their income!

      Nope, not good for ambulances, which usually operate in high-population density areas. Even experienced ambulance drivers have accidents; I wouldn't trust a machine to do this. Nope, wouldn't work for taxis; this would require sophisticated speech recognition. Nope, wouldn't work for pizza wagon, since somebody still has to knock on the door and collect the money (although automated baking while en route would be a good idea even if you had a driver). Nope, the only real application for this is driving across the dessert, tracking people down, and killing them...

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    2. Re:Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Search Google for "Kubelwagen". It was the WWII German equivalent of the American Jeep, shared most of its guts with the civilian Volkswagen, and yes, sometimes even had a machinegun on it.

      (Next from Disney: The Revenge of Herbie.)

  3. UK Grand Challenge by Warfire · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    Here's a picture from our local paper http://www.etingley.com/photogallery/index.php?act ion=image&gallery=MEng%20Robot%20-%20Henry&dir=pho tos/MEng%20Robot%20-%20Henry&filename=midweek.jpg.

    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

  4. The Mars rover would benifit rather a lot from thi by rucs_hack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.