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."

Comments

Terminator or Explorer?

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[SpyPlane]

I don't know about these being used as unmanned 'weapons', but certainly the military will use them for transport vehicles. The real reason for this competition was to create technology that would save lives. This is even more appropriate now that a majority of deaths over in Iraq are due to road side bombs. Right now, weapon control systems will still have a human somewhere in the loop.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Have Blue]

Hopefully it will go into the scientific community and then onto the open market, where it can be used by any party for any purpose.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Zathrus]

Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons?

This phase is intentionally designed for developing unmanned transport vehicles for use in low/no traffic, rugged areas. Think resupply and medivac. That alone would vastly reduce support overhead and threat to support troops (who generally aren't wandering around in heavily armored vehicles like front line troops).

It's not designed for use as a weapons platform (there is no ability to determine threats or potential targets), nor for usage on other planets -- all of the vehicles make use of GPS to some degree (they can operate without, but are handicapped) and we don't exactly have constellations of sats flying around any other stellar bodies.

The military isn't particularly interested in completely autonomous weapon systems -- it's too damn dangerous to your own people. The last thing you need is an autonomous anti-tank or anti-infantry mis-identifying your own (or your allies) weapons/troops as targets and eliminating them. We have enough friendly fire problems with humans at the controls -- and robots are far, far behind humans when it comes to properly identifying things.

There's plenty of civilian uses too -- another reply already mentioned a good number of them.

We can't even imagine the uses this will be put to

[John Jorsett]

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.

progress on the cheap

[Douglas Simmons]

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.

Still too slow

[Krater76]

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.