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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 for one am very happy to see this technology advancing. It's not gonna take much intelligence to make an autonomous driver better than most human drivers.
End transmission.
The software and use of sensors, as well as the sensors themselves are being driven to places that they probably wouldn't have gone if not for this contest. Sure, the 2 million dollars is a big-ish prize, but bragging rights are bigger.
I've seen some hobby roboticists building smaller robots for a scaled down version of this that are just amazing. Even on smaller scales, this is pushing technology. The good part? Much of the hobby stuff is pretty much shared in an OSS kind of way. That means that the technology behind all this will not belong entireley to the military, and will soon find its way into our vehicles and homes.... THAT is very cool!
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The challenge takes place in off road conditions. Existing vehicles like SUVs can handle the conditions where legos most likely can't. They didn't pic SUVs to pick SUVs. They picked them because they are vehivles that can handle the terrain
Evolution or ID?
Did AI research implode for lack of funding, or is it really that hard?
None of the competitors are doing true AI. They are not using learning systems as far as I know. This is just good old fashioned programming where the designers/programmers try to think of all possibilities in advance. I don't see how this contest is advancing our understanding of intelligence. I think that the qualifying rules should have been more stringent and should have prohibited non-learning systems. Otherwise it's the same old traditional stuff.
Driving across 150 miles of roadless, obstacle-ridden desert is not something most humans do, or even attempt. Don't be so sure that "even severely IQ handicapped humans" could handle it routinely.
Will we need Cray-like computing power to handle the sensory input quickly enough to work a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal?
Yes, because being able to take two dimensional sensory input and use it to construct an acccurate three-dimensional representation of the local surroundings, and then plan a viable route through those surroundings, is not a trivial task. People do it pretty well (at least when on foot), but then they've had billions of years of development time put into their massively parallel computational hardware. Computers can do it too, and eventually that "Cray-like computing power" will be squeezed down into smaller boxes, but it isn't an easy problem.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Has any of the contestents overcome the obstacle of negative space (i.e. a cliff, a sudden drop, a crater)?
Its easier to detect something that is there like a bale of hay by radar, but what about something that isn't there (isn't an object sticking out of the ground, in y+ axis)? If not, I can see alot of Wile E. Coyote incidents with these cars flying off cliffs.
(**poof**)
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I for one am very happy to see this technology advancing. It's not gonna take much intelligence to make an autonomous driver better than most human drivers.
The benefits of having cars that drive themselves will be enormous. First, these cars can be programmed to drive in a manner that conserves gasoline (e.g., no jack-rabbit starts, limit speeds to 55 mph, time their accelerations between stoplights so they don't have to come to a complete stop at every one). Second, cars that drive themselves in a rational manner -- instead of the emotional, irrational manner that people drive them -- can significantly reduce traffic jams. There is an insightful analysis of traffic jams at this page which explains that jams are larely the result of people not letting other people merge into their lane coupled with the relatively-slow reaction time of humans. Cars that can synchronize their motion in relation to nearby traffic could make traffic jams a thing of the past.
Not to mention that if the car drives itself, I can read slashdot on the commute home (or watch Natalie Portman movies).
GMD
watch this
He doesn't know the mean of the phrase AI.
AI doesn't mean "Learning", it means Artificial Intelligence. Said poster is probably a stage in his life where his visual system is relatively stable from day to day. Whether it got there by being hard wired by his designer or through learning is irrelevant. His intelligent behavior (barring perhaps said post) on a moment to moment basis is the result of his pre-wired system, not some kind of fabulously amazing learning algorithm.
Some of the engineers attacking this problem are using machine learning, others are using pre-fab algorithm, most are using a combination of both. They're all true AI by any stretch of the definition.