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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."
Well golly, since the whole thing is sponsored by DARPA, an agency of the US Department of Defense, I think they'll use this technology to ^(80948Q#4NO CARRIER
Video coverage here (there's a whole bunch. The overview, stanley and ghostrider ones are awesome!):
c h/channels/index.cfm/channel/cartv_video/action/sh owvideo/vid/e_0145/vcat/Event/
i c_id=1636&forum_id=30&Topic_Title=NQE&forum_title= Grand+Challenge+Event&M=False&S=
...stopped by the NQE last week and this whole Tuesday
and I must say that all the work accomplished on all the
AGVs was very impressive. ...for those who couldn't be there the following bots all
had runs in the morning session:
"Mojavaton, DAD, CIMAR, Insight Racing, Golem Group,
ENSCO,
Princeton, MonsterMoto, Team Jefferson, UCF,, AION,
Cajunbot, Banzai,
Gray Team, Mitre Meteorites, Virginia Tech Grand
Challenge Team, Austin
Robot, Desert Buckeyes."
All had full runs except five. Majavaton and Insight
Racing which both collided with a vehicle/obstacle within
100 yards of the finish line. Aion decided to skip the
course and circle back directly to the finish line but a K-
rail barrier refused to co-operate. The UCF bot went
walkabout on the back 40 towards the NASCAR track and
Austin Robotics got sulky in the first loop when the crowd
left for lunch during its run. MonsterMoto was given a
restart because a chase truck encroached on the route
near the start. ...according to some team members from Ensco, the
afternoon session was a chance for the teams "on the
cusp" to improve their standings. Austin Robotics,
CajunBot, VT, Team Banzai, Mojavaton, the Mitre Group,
and the Gray Team all had additional runs. ...Mojavaton, VT, Mitre (had two) and the Gray Team all
had full runs. The Gray Team had two runs but was unable
to to get GPS back after the tunnel on the first run so they
made a few adjustments and had a stellar 2nd run. It
seemed like a time/constelation problem. CajunBot made
it to the last Obstacle/vehicle to the chagrin of the crowd.
Team Banzai froze contemplating a witch's hat on a
downhill transition at the end of the first loop and Austin
Robotics lost GPS (and its way) after the tunnel... ...after that the best of the rest ran (Autonosys, Blue
Team, Overbot, Indiana Robotic NAV, BJB
Engineering, Team Juggernaut, Autonomous Vehicle
Systems, Team Tormenta,
Indy Robot Racing, Terra Engineering, PVHA Road
Warriors, CyberRider, AI
Motorvators, Team Underdawg. )with most of the teams
wiping out the first barrier, and/or re-arranging the hay
bales at the tunnel entrance, colliding with the tunnel
entrance and losing GPS after the tunnel. However, IT,
from AI motorvaters had a full run on the shortened RDDF
and TerraHawk made it thru most of the hard parts.
Overbot ran very thoroughly and cautiously but froze on
the downhill transition. ...if any of this information is incorrect please feel free to
fix...I could be suffering the effects of sunstroke... ...anyhow, good luck all and I admire dedication of all of
the teams on completing an AGV. ...see y'all in Primm,
Espina
http://www.cartv.com.nyud.net:8090/content/resear
NQE final paper:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/NQEfinal1.pdf
And more announcements can be found on:
http://www.grandchallenge.org/
Also, a good summary of things that have been happening can be found in the discussion forum:
https://dtsn.darpa.mil/grandc/forum/topic.asp?top
=====
A post by Espina reads:
Hi!
If you're wondering what the DARPA Challenge is, you have to scroll to the bottom the their flash website:
"The DARPA Grand Challenge is an unprecedented government effort to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles to help save American lives on the battlefield. DARPA will award $2 million to the autonomous (robotic) ground vehicle that can successfully navigate a challenging desert course of approximately 150 miles the fastest (in less than 10 hours). The vehicles must find and follow a prescribed course route, avoid obstacles, and negotiate turns, all while travelling at militarily-relevant rates of speed. The ground vehicles are fully autonomous - not remote-controlled."
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.
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.
Due to the speed limits imposed at the qualifications, the vehicles could not get much better times.
r e_update/
At the qualifications, there were mandatory speed limits imposed in most (if not all) the areas. In the RDDF file, there are the GPS coordinates and a speed limit number. For example, the straight away was 40mph while some of the obstacle strewn areas was 5 mph. The vehicles are capable of going faster and in fact a couple vehicles maxed out the 40 mph on the straight away.
DARPA officials at the media press conference on Wednesday said that if they stick to the race speed limits, then they will finish in about 6 1/2 to 7 hours. In the real race, there are hard speed limits and then there are suggested limits (which a team can break). The suggested speed limits are in low obstacle areas, but are suggeseted so that the chase vehicle doesn't lose sight of the robot. Remember that this race is being held in the desert, so the dust kicked up could obscure it from view.
Quirky fact, the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) mandates 25 mph or less in desert tortoise areas. You gotta love beauracracy.
Some of this is explained in my article on tgdaily.com
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/06/darpa2005_featu