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DARPA Grand Challenge Finalists Announced
Xerotope writes "DARPA announced today the 23 finalists[pdf warning] of the DARPA Grand Challenge at the closing ceremonies of the National Qualifying Event. Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team will start on Saturday with the first and third positions, with 'H1ghlander' taking the pole position and 'Sandstorm' following 10 minutes later. Stanford's 'Stanley' will start second. Of the 43 semi-finalists, 23 robots managed to finish the 2.2 mile course at least once. 5 robots (Stanford, Red Team, Red Team Too, Axion Racing, and Team Teramax) completed all of their runs. CMU's 'H1ghlander' and 'Sandstorm' finished the four runs with an average time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds each. Stanford's Stanley average time was 10:43."
The question is...Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons? Or, will it be used in a more gentile fashion to explore hostile environments such as the Moon, Mars and the other planets?
Let's hope this technology will be used to advance our understanding of our planet and the universe.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
The answer of course is that, once autonomous vehicles are possible and proven, the door is open to any use. The military will use them to deliver supplies, and so will relief organizations. Private companies will use them to transport materials for, for example, the building of remote pipelines or roads. Ranchers will use them to patrol the boundaries of their acreage. Security companies will employ autonomous vehicles to keep an eye on the perimeters of land they're guarding. Universities will use them to explore the arctic, antarctic, and other hostile environments. Radical nutjobs will use them to deliver deadly payloads instead of using human beings. And there will be a host of applications that we haven't even thought of yet.
Well, I think it's good to use robotic soldiers to spare soldiers' lives... but shouldn't the enemy have their own robotic soldiers, too?
Otherwise, it won't be a war. It will be a masacre.
These DARPA competitions (and those of other organizations) have got to be one of the best ways to come up with new and useful technology. Instead of rowboat races, the bright and motivated students of top universities (as well as other entusiasts) compete against each other for a battle of imagination and ingenuity to win not useless trophies but the thrill of having created something of potential practical use. Also, these competitions help boost the reputations of the colleges and universities as these often get media coverage, and if you've noticed, they've got their school's name on their autonomous submarines. And of course, DARPA gets some cheap R&D.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's very difficult to cover 150 miles in 10 hours, obviously, you need a minimum speed of 15 mph. Their 2.2-mile semifinal course had a best average time of 10:20. That's still just under 13 mph. If the average time was 8 minutes or less I'd be excited.
Don't get me wrong I'm very impressed with the results so far but it might just not be enough. Here's to hoping that they can make up some time elsewhere.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Considering that "humanitarians" frequently go on and on about how human life is paramount, that for a home owner to not take EVERY means to de-escalate a situation including running away from his own property, and that to defend yourself is to be judge, jury and executioner -- you'd think you WOULD love that.
Because, of course, it doesn't matter if they burn your house and steal your property; you're not supposed to value your property over their life. Gosh, they might even be mentally ill and therefore it's not really their fault. Oh well.
(And yes, that's the sort of argument one hears an awful lot... on Fark, anyway.)
On a less incendiary note, you should take note that it's not infrequently the slightly disadvantaged side that starts wars -- but that they do not necessarily fully realize their own difficulties. For example: In retrospect, a sane analysis should have indicated that the Confederacy, with much inferior manpower, industrial base, and naval forces and no real advantage in doctrine (officers in both sides having been trained through the same system) was essentially doomed barring a sudden shock that would make war politically unpalatable for the North. The "one of ours is worth ten of theirs because our boys learned to shoot when young" spiel and other myths, however, combined with bravado to apparently mislead them. Were they facing a force that they could not see any means to defeat, they probably wouldn't have started a war, and a rather great number of people wouldn't have died. You wouldn't have had the abuses of Reconstruction, and perhaps the South would have been less ready for the rise of the Klan.
It might also have been suggested that for Germany and Japan to have thought they could win against the rest of the world over the long haul was insane, based on population, area, resource distribution, and so forth. Japan, in particular, had vulnerable supply lines... It took an awful lot of inhumanity to prove them wrong.
But if Saddam -knew- that the US would have intervened after the Kuwait situation, and he -knew- that the US had not only the military means but the political will to defeat him utterly, would he have gone ahead anyway? Assuming that he was even slightly rational, he probably would have backed down instead of trying to enforce his territorial claims, and we wouldn't have ended up with years of sanctions hurting his general population while illicit oil revenue found its way into his palaces. Wars start when people think they can win, even when they're actually wrong.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.