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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."
than a soccer mom driving her only child in an SUV it's an SUV driving no one.
Argh.
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."
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.
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.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Remember the famouse automaton Mephisto from the 19th century that claimed to be a chess playing robot.h tml
http://www.angelfire.com/games/SBChess/automaton.
I think I could hide a midget inside an SUV with enough computer looking doohickies to make a cool $2mill.
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?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.