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

Does it come with a stereo?

[Realistic_Dragon]

I wish my girlfriend could drive 200 miles without crashing into something. Perhaps theres a trade in programme or something?

Hummer went 200 miles without a problem...

[RandoX]

Was it refueled on the fly?

How many mploc?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many miles per line of code?

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.

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

[Hays]

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.

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:The worlds most boring race

[westlake]

Hopefully they've picked up the pace a bit. Otherwise they'll never go 200 miles through the open desert in the alloted time.

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?

Re:The worlds most boring race

[jeblucas]

Machine moves 10 feet, stops.
Moves 5 feet, stops.
Moves 40 feet, stops.
Turns 10 degrees.
Turns 15 degrees.
Moves 10 feet, stops.

Apparently it took 100,000 lines of code because it's written in Logo.

FORWARD 5
FORWARD 40
RIGHT 10
RIGHT 15
FORWARD 10

Go Standford!

[American AC in Paris]

Standford's Stanley, a VW Taureg run by 100000 lines of code can hit 40 mph

I'll bet the teams from Harverd, Berkely and NIT are quaking in their boots.

Re:Go Standford!

[Anonymous Coward]

Captain, I'm detecting extremely low levels of clue in the area.

Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer!

[SmartyFartBlast]

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).

Re:Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer!

[Locke2005]

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...

Re:Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer!

[CrankyFool]

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.

This is a darpa contest?

[nizo]

When do they start allowing contestant cars to carry guns/rockets/etc to take out other cars?

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.

No gas?

[slapout]

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....)

Desert driving...bah!

[regjoe]

Try navigating rush hour traffic...now that would be a trick. Could have a robotic hand for giving someone the bird....just a thought!

Publicity for VW...

[martin_b1sh0p]

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?

[tlambert]

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

Did anyone else see this and think...

[eSims]

Standford's Stanley, a VW Taureg run by 100000 lines of code can hit 40 mph and has now traversed all but 3 miles of last year's desert course without problems.

Herbie!

Re:20? What are the elimination criteria?

[Locke2005]

What are the elimination criteria Well, for one thing, running over one of the judges is grounds for immediate dismissal from the competition!

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?

UK Grand Challenge

[Warfire]

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

Just wondering...

[Mad Ogre]

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.

The Mars rover would benifit rather a lot from thi

[rucs_hack]

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.

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.

Re:Yes but...

[f0dder]

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)

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.

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