Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
fishdan wrote to mention that the Darpa Grand Challenge is getting underway again. The qualifying rounds started yesterday. National media has picked up on the story, with pieces at the Washington Post and Seattle Times. From the Post: "The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the Oct. 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge. The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control. Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles _ hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars _ while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers."
I had a chance to see the Volkswagen / Stanford entry while getting my VW serviced. That cart is pretty cool. There's a rack and a half worth of gear in the back and the shift knob has been modified to allow a robot arm to be attached. The engine is a 5 cylinder TDI and the VIN says it's a factory prototype. I heard that when the challenge is over the car will have to be destroyed since it certainly isn't US legal. And in a parody of the "Drivers Wanted" slogan it says "No Driver Required" on the side. :-) Seeing it in person certainly made waiting for my oil change fun.
On a side note...I wish they'd let more diesel cars in the country. The chase car is another Touraeg but this one is a Canadian V10 TDI. It has something like 500 lb-ft of torque but gets about the same highway mileage as my small VW does.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
YES, this task is THAT hard. If the military could simply throw money at the problem and get the solution, there would be no DARPA Grand Challenge competition at all.
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what the human does with one eye, let alone two. Humans have that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
The problems of autonomous ground vehicles are greater than that of planes because there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks the DARPA GC vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php . There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People