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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. :)
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.
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.
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!
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!
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)