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."

Comments

If there's one thing worse

[HugePedlar]

than a soccer mom driving her only child in an SUV it's an SUV driving no one.

No Driver Required...

[JakiChan]

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.

Re:No Driver Required...

[itistoday]

I just got off the phone with a team that's there. Apparently Stanford did the best in the semifinals so far, making it through the obstacle course without hitting a single cone and cruising at a comfortable 40 mph. Carnage Mellon, a favorite last year, actually did surprisingly bad and ended up hitting a lot of cones. The University of Florida also had a good run, only nicking a cone or two. It seems like it's gonna be a worthwhile race this year. And trust me, it is really difficult to make one of these machines.

Good luck contestants

[lightyear4]

This will be a MUCH more interesting contest if the teams do better than the last time around. (the best team only got 7 miles out of 175 total.) Granted, even that is impressive given the circumstances.

I wish the best of luck to all of those competing.

Finally...

[evil agent]

...we're putting the "auto" into automobile.

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.

Only in America could it say *from* SUV :-)

[fantomas]

Only in the USA could it say FROM souped-up SUVs :-)

Here in the UK it would probably be FROM a bunch of lego bricks and a clockwork motor UP TO a Sinclair C5 (or possibly an Austin Mini with an Aibo gaffa-taped in)...

This is very cool

[zappepcs]

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!

The amazing failures of AI?

[Elrac]

I read the reports once in a while: The winners, or close-to-finishers, are huge SUVs filled with computers and special-purpose sensory equipment. What this tells me is that today's computer technology still has trouble, in many cubic feet of space, and with practically unlimited electrical power, to find realtime solutions for a problem that even severely IQ handicapped humans handle routinely while balancing a McMeal on their knees and keeping up a cell phone conversation. I would wager that, with a fair amount of training and suitable controls, even a dog could handle the task. So...

Did AI research implode for lack of funding, or is it really that hard? Will we need Cray-like computing power to handle the sensory input quickly enough to work a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal? Or has this problem simply never been tackled by sufficiently big money? And, given the obvious military implications and a $400 Billion military budget alone, why not?

All these questions are quite serious, and I'd be interested in hearing answers.

Re:The amazing failures of AI?

[zappepcs]

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.

Video of MITRE entry

[eludom]

FYI there is a 5min introductory video clip of the the MITRE entry here:

      http://www.mitre.org/tech/meteor/

I saw it a few months ago doing it's thing around the
parking lot. It will be interesting to see how they
do on a live course.

Website to Track Race

[robyn217]

Yeah, I just hope someone can finish the race. It looks like the best site out there to track the race is GrandChallenge.org. They have team write-ups and blogs.

I know my money is on Austin Robot Technology. Vehicle "(Not Available)" sounds like it'll be a real winner. lol!

-robyn

This is not true AI

[MOBE2001]

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.

Re:This is not true AI

[Zathrus]

By not requiring learning systems, DARPA is not encouraging progress in AI

Since visual perception and interpretation is often considered an AI related field of research, I'd say you're wrong.

But, more importantly, you still don't get it. The GC's goal isn't to encourage progress in AI -- it's to develop an autonomous supply vehicle. Do you have any idea how much of the military is involved purely in transport/resupply?

The US defence department would sell its soul for a truly intelligent system and that's what we should be after.

Funny. That contradicts a rather large number of public statements from the DoD. And privately I suspect the more sane individuals don't want it either -- we've seen more than enough SF flicks that go into the potential issues with such a thing.

include big-city driving in the challenge

Yes, and we should make all toddlers learn to run before walking or crawling.

It's called incremental progress -- right now the DoD could benefit immensely from a fully autonomous transport vehicle that simply goes between depots in low traffic but highly rugged environments. After that you could look at highway driving (which is already being worked on by all the major automobile companies) and then maybe high-traffic conditions. But that last one is of relatively little use to the DoD, and DARPA is only mandated for Defense related projects.

As it stands, all we're gonna get is clever engineering which we already know we're good at, but not good enough.

When it comes down to it, it's all just "clever engineering" -- especially in retrospect. Most progress is made in small steps, not giant leaps.

What about negative space?

[Druox]

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**)

Autonomous cars and traffic jams

[GuyMannDude]

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

How about a Midget?

[spicydragonz]

Remember the famouse automaton Mephisto from the 19th century that claimed to be a chess playing robot.
http://www.angelfire.com/games/SBChess/automaton.h tml
I think I could hide a midget inside an SUV with enough computer looking doohickies to make a cool $2mill.

Estimates on brain power

[jd]

There are some interesting estimates out on the web of how fast the human brain can process data. Current estimates are between 10^13 and 10^16 operations per second, which would put the upper limit at about 10 giga mips (remember, 'mips' is a million instructions per second). If we assume the brain handles 'reals' rather than integer values for data, then this translates to about 10 peta flops.

In comparison, the world's fastest supercomputer (BlueGene/L) is rated at a maximum of 183,500 gigaflots, which is about 0.2 peta flops, or one fiftieth of the maximum speed of the human brain.

Now, you don't NEED the full processing power of the human brain in order to drive. That's not my point. My point is that a car-load of computer parts, at the current level of technology, is probably going to drive about as well as a Horseshoe Crab. I'm actually very impressed that developers have actually got as far as they have, as they're very unlikely to be using state-of-the-art technology for this, most are probably using pile-of-PC architectures, not much more than some webcams for vision and basic motors for the robot linkage, most likely continuous for power - steppers have vastly superior accuracy but have no force behind them.

You also have to look at the power cleaning systems they need - car batteries are NOT smooth and car electrical systems are typically pretty rough. On the other hand, computers need power that is spike-free and ADCs (analog-to-digital converters) rely on a steady reference voltage to be able to do anything useful. A noisy power system would be Bad News for a self-operating vehicle. Oh, and computers don't do well when hot, but air conditioning units - particularly if they switch on and off - are going to add some serious noise to the power.

Whoever builds a car that can go a decent distance is worthy of vast respect and awe, because there are some massive technical problems that require ingenious hacking of mechanical, electrical and microelectronic systems to operate in some pretty harsh environments.

I do think DARPA would be foolish to end the contest if there is a winner this year - rather, they should extend the challenge. Have the vehicles go through a wider range of terrains, as a multi-stage rally, perhaps, with cars who succeed in the desert then having to navigate through a forest, swamps, along the tops of snow-covered mountains - pretty much any terrain that a vehicle could realistically encounter if used for military missions.

If DARPA did that, and the contestents succeeded, then (and pretty much only then) would DARPA have a general-purpose robotic vehicle they could throw into any arena that would be hazardous for humans under combat conditions. Why stop when you have something that could have made things easier three years ago had it existed, but which may be useless in a scenario three years from now, when the dangers may be completely different?