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Stanford's Stanley wins DARPA Grand Challenge
tonyquan writes "DARPA has just announced that Stanford's "Stanley" autonomous ground vehicle has won the Grand Challenge, a $2 million contest for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile course in California's Mohave Desert. Stanley's winning time over the course was 6 hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds, for an average speed of 19.1 mph. Second was Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm (7:04:50), third went to another CMU vehicle "H1ghlander" (7:14:00) and fourth to the Gray Team's KAT-5 (7:30:16) More info from DARPA."
Almost 20 miles per hour on unpaved roads with an autonomous vehicle? That's not the same as driving on paved roads in the city or on the highway. I think that's pretty good, actually.
Well, so were Einstein, Werner von Braun... etc. :)
Aircraft on autopilot aren't exactly good at avoiding flocks of birds and the like though are they?
The skies are a blissful place compared to the M25 on a friday night. The navigation side is easy, avoiding next doors dog is hard.
jh
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.
Oh, snap!
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people without putting our boys and girls in harm's way. Slight difference there. You make it sound like they're trying to roll out waves of little Terminators. No, they're just trying to achieve the same field presence without having to deal with sending as many sad letters to the families of kids who's final group photo was under an array of U.S. flags inside boxes within the cargo hold of a C-130.
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.
You're making the common mistake of assuming that the purpose of the military is to kill people. It's not. The purpose of the military is primarily to defend your country, and secondarily to defend other people where this is deemed beneficial to your country's interests. Killing people is one of the ways this is done, but the primary goal in a war is to persuade the enemy to surrender, not to kill as many of them as possible. If you can use smart weapons and special forces to take out their infrastructure or their commanders, you can get the majority of the opposing forces to give up. Similarly, the average soldier, faced with an enemy that knows no fear, feels no pain, and has nothing to lose but money - in other words, an unmanned assault vehicle - is not going to go out and fight it if he can help it.
Oh, and I'll just add at this point that the most recent thing I heard in the media about the US army was this: that they just sent eight military helicopters to help survivors of the earthquake in central Asia. That's not "killing people". That's your army spending a heckuvalot of money to help people who are not only foreigners, but, by and large, actually hate America. This is called "doing good", and I speak for much of the world when I say that we admire America when it does good. And it doesn't take much imagination to think of other ways America could do good, if it had better AI and robotics technology at its command: think of small autonomous reconnaisance robots, being used to locate survivors in the rubble.
Agreed. Our team called Stanford "Red Team Three".
Both teams seemed like one during the NQE.
I personally am most excited about Grey Team, who finished the course and most importantly is *not* CMU or Stanford.
By all means, don't allow facts to get in the way of your hysterical editorializing. The DoD is not developing an unmanned ground assault vehicle, and they do not state that explicitly at all. They are looking to procure an unmanned cargo carrying vehicle by 2015. You will, of course, probably point to how everything in the military is designed to support operations and is therefore contributing to killing people, but that'd just be weaseling. You clearly thought they were developing killer robots. Let's hear it for reading comprehension! Moron.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
You might ask the media, which is always portraying our soldiers as poor, immature chumps who were victimized by the administration.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Granted it wont ride as nice as most commercial cars but it will stand up in an accident better than any of them.
Personally, I'd rather have a car designed to absorb that impact at the cost of itself rather than just passing it along to me... heck, maybe I'm just weird that way. Forces have to go somewhere, don't'cha know.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
A lot of the vehicles that didn't make it seem to have stopped due to equipment failures - primarily various sensors malfunctioning. It would be really interesting to find out why the ones that didn't finish didn't.
Broken sensor? Drove into a reporter? Tire fell off?
It would be nice to know where the weak link was - poor hardware, poor software, or just a poor car?
So if you know where to find this information, I'd love to know. :-)
It'd probably be better if our armed forces stopped inovating, and just waited for the rest of the world to advance beyond our own capabiilty to respond, eh? Because, if we stop concerning ourselves with war, the whole world will instantly fall into a state of peace and be covered with pretty flowers.
I d=107011i ces_and_specs/opt_equipment.htm (look at the first available option)
Obviously, any students who learn more about effectively automate vehicles will *never* find a way to apply that technology in a non-lethal environment...
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/News/article
http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/vehicles/s-type/pr
Yes, anything that can potentially be used to kill someone should be off-limits for research, regardless of its usefulness in other arenas. Especially if, heaven forbid, the *military* encourages development!
...with DUI in ye olden days, because no matter how snookered you got, old dobbin knew the way home. If you could make it into the saddle, the rest was biological guidance system that could function quite well with little to no input from the pilot/driver/operator. The fuel source was environmentally friendly and sustainable as well, heh. Solar powered, intelligent and self replicating, something to be said for the "old ways".
You're making a very strange argument, are you saying a German can't be an integral part of harnessing American ingenuity? Perchance you've mixed up patriotism with nationalism?
;) but everyone knows why and it's ok once in a while lol).
Hasn't it always been the case, and still is, that America attracts many (if not most) of the finest scientist, engineers, analysts, and thinkers no matter where they were born or the type of society they originate from?
My answer would be yes.
You see for all the populist scorn the United States of America receives both within and outside its borders the fact of the matter is that for all its faults the U.S.A. still actually works pretty well (or do you perhaps think that people travel to work and live and integrate into the U.S. because somebody forced them? Do you think a large percentage of middle eastern youth and grownups look to american institutions of learning and justice because they were brainwashed? Do you think the U.S. government has such influence internationally because others don't want them to have it? Except France once in a while on that last one
*Glomps America from across the pond*
What makes America great is its openness to anybody who wants to achieve, you don't get much for free except tons of opportunity, it might not be the best place in the world for people like me who haven't achieved much of anything but I'm truly happy such a place does exist, even with its faults.
Oh well, from what I heard no one was too excited about the Wright brothers' achievement at the very beginning either.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
Where I grew up, as long as there are deer, there will be accidents :)
Who exactly was supposed to get killed out there in the desert? If you're talking short-term, these vehicles were designed for a competition. If you're talking long-term, then any research could potentially be used for war. If you wanna be real technical, these vehicles will likely never kill anyone - they're just carrying the killing equipment somewhere. The bird flu could potentially be used directly to kill, so it's different. Do tire companies who make stuff for the military count in the list of people who weer working for the military to kill people? What about those people with Jeeps - how dare they support the company that got our troops into several terrible battles!
Merely being sponsored by the US military does not guarantee evil. I'm a big fan of that Internet thing, for example. Then again, I also own guns which are not intended to kill people, and computers which aren't used to calculate missile trajectories (even though they may well have been designed with other plans), so I'll probably never understand.
The purpose of the military is primarily to defend your country
and secondarily to defend other people where this is deemed beneficial to your country's interests.
I'm not necessarily anti-military, and understand that the military both helps and harms people. However, your rosy picture of our happy military is a gross oversimplification, and dare I say, bullshit. Here is a link to Wikipedia's definition. An excerpt:
The soldiers and warfare part stands out for me. Those equate to killing people. You can call it whatever you want, but the reality is that it is what it is.
-Turkey
19.1 mph? I mean, congradulations to the winners, and I'm sure there's a reason for the speed to be so low...but can anyone explain what that is to me?
20 mph isn't bad for an off-road vehicle, or military convoy (which is the ultimate goal of this technology). Last time I went for a ride in a Humvee across the Iraqi desert, we didn't go much more than 30 mph - and that was over mostly flat desert.
It should also be mentioned that at least the Stanford team and the CMU team claim to have completed the old course while preparing for this year's event. So even if this year's course is easier, there are some teams that completed the old course anyhow. Obviously this wasn't under race conditions (the most important condition being that you don't know the course until just before the race) but it is still relevant.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This is America... we don't breed the smartest people in the world, we just attract them from wherever they happen to have been born. Ultimately, the ability to attract the brightest, most highly motivated people from all over the world has always been America's only real advantage.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people. Over 2000 good soldiers dead in Iraq, many by Improvised Explosive Devices... how many of those deaths good have been prevented by using autonomous vehicles for patrols instead of manned ones? Perhaps the universities beleive the opposite is true -- there helping keep armed forces people from being killed. Face, if the goal of the armed forces were simply to kill people, then nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons would do it much more quickly and efficiently than an autonomous vehicle! The trick is not simply to kill people, but to kill the RIGHT people. I don't think anybody honestly beleives that autonomous vehicles can decide who the right people are, so it is much more likely these will be used to prevent deaths rather than cause them. That could only be a good thing, unless you happen to be a member of an "insurgency". Personally, I prefer being able to say "Ha-ha! You just killed a robot!" to anybody that attacks our vehicles.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.