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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.
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)
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.