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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."
Last year they had NO vehicles even make it out of the obstacle course.. and this year they had several vehicles actually complete the desert course?? What gives?
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I honestly didn't think this contest would ever be won. Maybe in 20 years we can have auto driving cars that can make it so there is next to 0 car accidents.
Less than 20mph in an SUV through the desert. These Robot control cars are worse than my Grandmother on an interstate.
Quite clearly these Robot controlled cars are part of a sophisticated plot to increase the amount of road rage in the US to enable the Robots to take over the country... and then the world.
It is not too late to stop them, we must insist that the next competition involves only Ford Broncos and takes place on the Freeways of Los Angeles during rush hour.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
DARPA Grand Challange - Harnessing American Ingenuity ... as it turns out, the leader of the winning Stanford car team is a German.
Looking at the final stats on the Grand Challenge website, it would seem that only five teams, out of the 23 that made the finals, were able to finish the course. The team that got the farthest before calling it quits managed about 80 miles, which means that the cut between those who made it and those who didn't was still pretty big. Another interesting thing about the final results is that, if you look at the pretty red and blue graph lines, they describe what looks like a sort of decaying function...
Or perhaps I'm just a dork.
No, but I can say Fahrvergnügen, especially since Stanford's team leader Sebastian Thrun is actually from Germany, you hit the nail on the head.
Great run, saw it on TV yesterday, and a major step in development of fully autonomous bots.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
While I'm happy that these hard-working academics were successful, I can't help but note the downside to this development.
Forget military applications. What I foresee is that, for computer scientists who've lost their jobs to outsourcing, this will deprive them of one more alternative, namely a career as a taxi/truck/bus/etc driver.
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Rel
Darpa has just announced? I read this in my morning paper (in the UK) several hours ago.
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.
Take a look at the route on the darpa web site.
Portions of the route DARPA set the speed limit as low as 5 mph. The highest speed limit on the course was 45 mph. The route included very very narrow passages, twisty bits along the side of mountains with 100 foot droppoffs and no guard rails, chunks with no roads at all going through gullies, tunnels with no GPS feeds where you have to navigate inertially and with sensors.
This was _hard_
The course did have a fair number of twists and turns in it. There were some places, like dried lake beds, where the cars could open up a bit, but for the most part it was bumpy dirt tracks one which even you or I couldn't do more than, say, 40 mph. There were also, intentionally, a fair number of obstacles designed to throw the computer systems off. You and I wouldn't have much difficulty in recognizing a cattle gate on a road, but imagine trying to teach a computer vision system to distinguish that. In other cases, the robots had to drive through tunnels that would not only be dark (making vision systems less accurate) but also lack any GPS signal.
So, yes, it did average out to a pretty slow "race." But, on the other hand, it is a marked improvement over last time, when no one even came close to finishing. I think that, in the interests of trying to ensure that they safely finished the course, let alone win, the various teams were playing it a little conservatively, and not trying to go for pedal-to-the-metal performance. Maybe next year, now that they have some confidence.
"Drivers unnecessary"
For far better info than the anemic (and completely flash based) gc.org site:
m l -- DARPA's GC message boardse nge2005/ -- Was updated throughout the actual event. Best coverage I've seen yet.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/discussion.ht
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/08/darpagrandchall
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/darpachallenge/ -- Popular Science's rather disorganized site
I'm still looking for "highlight" video myself... or pretty much any non-bland video (seeing them cross the finish line is nifty and all, but that was not a challenging part of the race). I particularly want video of Alice trying to take out some reporters!
One other thing to note is that this is hardly the first instance of cars driving themselves. Even in the late 1990's, there were several institutions that had programs to develop cars that could drive themselves. I believe CMU outfitted a minivan to drive coast to coast autonomously. There were some caveats, like having a human driver in the seat, hands poised over the steering wheel, ready to take control in an instance. I also think that, when the team was pulling off the highway to find a motel for the night, that was done by humans, too. But, for the highway stretches, where the car was operating autonomously, the vehicle was able to cruise at highway speeds (i.e., around 65 mph).
In fact, one member of the team explained in a conference that they aimed to finish the race. Which was already a great achievement. DARPA has put a time limit on the race and Stanford chose a speed which was the lowest possible (to lower risks of accidents) while still providing a secure margin for unexpected events. (From what I remember, they planed to have an average of 30 mph so they race must have been thougher than they thought)
If there is a Grand Challenge in 2006, it will probably look more like a race, now that everyone knows it is possible.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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Being funny is my sig nature.
a $2 million contest for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile course in California's Mohave Desert.
The car is powered by 7 Pentium M laptops. No drivers? Are the laptops running in Safe Mode? Ah, that explains why its average speed is 19.1mph.
w00t
sort of.
...) while i think palo alto has much better weather than pittsburgh :)
:) I would'nt be surprised if they also use large parts of the basic control and command software infrastructure (TCX) written by thrun and others while at cmu. if it is, no wonder they required
:)
the stanford leader (thrun) and their lead software developer
(mike montelermo (sp?)) were originally from cmu.
they only recently moved to stanford. although thrun claims it's coz of his wife, some people think it was coz of too much competition and bad blood at cmu which has lots of people working in mobile robots (wittaker, simmons, nourbaksh, choset,
the particle filter based localizer and mapper was developed while at CMU. Frank Dellaert (now at georgia tech) first introduced that to mobile robotics after reading about the
condensation algorithm in computer vision (i like to believe that i had a part in that last bit
7 PCs for redundancy, that is some of the worst spaghetti code i've ever had the displeasure of working with. it's easier to make it fault-tolerant by just throwing more hardware at it.
i'm not trying to belittle stanford in any way, but i just thought people might be interested in knowing that the real story in this case is a lot more complicated. the relationship between the winning teams were a lot more incestuous
thrun BTW is an amazing all-round guy with an infectious smile all the time.
Anybody know anything about the Gray Team and their bot? Their 4th-place finish seems to be far the best of any of the 'low budget' teams; about all I can find is that it was sponsored by The Gray Insurance Co., that their IT department (and founders who were bored of spending money on yachts?) worked on it, as well as some Tulane students, and that it was a Ford Escape (small SUV) hybrid.
They don't seem to have a webpage for the team...
Actually, planetary rovers are just a tiny, tiny portion of the reason for this challenge, otherwise NASA would be sponsoring this, not DARPA. The primary reason for this challenge is for troop supply and support vehicles that can accompany troops into a battlefield, or be sent in autonomously. Which means the jungle scenario is non-trivial. One of the reasons the challenge is being held where it is, is due to the development lifetime projected force deployments being in mainly desert regions. Another major projected use for these kinds of vehicles is for deployment in a bio-hazardous area for testing and sampling in an autonomous measure. But once again, the is a DARPA challenge, not a CDC one.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
That makes sense. I used to do some work with mobile robots at Brown University's AI lab, and I found that the difficulties were all about sensors. Once you could turn the physical obstacles into data abstractions and once you knew where the robot was in relation to them, the algorithms were pretty darned easy. I used to walk around pretending that I only had the information available to the robot and see how I did, with human intelligence, at avoiding obstacles. Our vision system was very slow and took 3 seconds per frame, so I'd close my eyes and blink them open for an instant every three seconds. It was very hard. Moving slow helped a lot, of course. Of course we were running on a 486 back then...
...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".
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)
I do have to disagree with a comment by the parent: "...some people think it was coz of too much competition and bad blood..." I never perceived this and computer science at CMU is remarkably sparse in bad blood compared to other universities.
When you look at the results, and you see two colleges with virtually unlimited resources and millions of dollars spent on their vehicles, huge corporate sponsors and engineers at their beck and call from Boeing to Catepillar, who finished, and then this dinky little Team Grey from a suburb of New Orleans, with a splintered development team as a result of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and they FINISHED just behind the big guys, leaving other heavily-funded vehicles in the dust.
Relatively speaking, a small indy group, even if their time was a tad slower than CMU or Stanford, essentially put those three teams to shame when you compare the resources they had available to them.
The real story here is who is behind the Grey team's car. It must be a far superior design than either CMU or Stanford's considering the limited resources and experience they had in addressing the challenge.