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."

Comments

Re:19.1?

[Schweg]

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.

Re:Patriotism... sigh

[reed]

Well, so were Einstein, Werner von Braun... etc. :)

Re:so wait..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:so wait..

[Dun Malg]

I'm sorry, but there's no pretense about this: the competition is designed to help the defense department deliver on its promise to congress to get most of its ground assault vehicles unmanned in the 2010 to 2015 time frame. They state it explicitly, and all over the place. The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.

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.

Re:so wait..

[cloudmaster]

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.

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/articleI d=107011
http://www.jaguarusa.com/us/en/vehicles/s-type/pri ces_and_specs/opt_equipment.htm (look at the first available option)

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!

Why isn't this a bigger deal?

[prozac79]

Why is the fact that 5 autonomous vehicles where able to traverse 132 miles not a bigger deal? I hardly saw any media coverage on this (not even mentioned in those closing "isn't this interesting" segments on local news). IMHO, this is another great "first" for mankind on par with Lindberg crossing the Atlantic or Rutan winning the X Prize. In the future, when automnomous vehicles are more ubiquitous, we will see that the pioneers were vehicles like Stanley. These engineers solved (or at least furthered our understanding) some very difficult problems of computer vision and perception. However, whenever I mention the Grand Challenge to people, they just give me a blank look. One person asked me if the Grand Challenge was some sort of football event.

Oh well, from what I heard no one was too excited about the Wright brothers' achievement at the very beginning either.