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Stanford's Stanley wins DARPA Grand Challenge

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the congrats-to-all-for-competing dept.

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."

35 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. so wait.. by molo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:so wait.. by Ansonmont · · Score: 3, Funny

      And, most of them were pretty close time-wise. The winner was only about 10 minutes or so ahead of the 2nd place finisher. From zero to five competitive finishers...of course all of these results will only be put to peaceful purposes. Isn't Darpa like a branch of the Peace Corps???

      -A

    2. Re:so wait.. by EEJD · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not so much an improvement in the AI as it is an improvement in the sensors. These vehicles look ahead about 30 feet and plot their course based on very simple logic. If there is a negative obstacle (a hole), it is more difficult for sensors to detect than if there is a rock sticking up in the path. Last race, the only thing that stopped red team was a hairpin turn. Their sensors looked straight ahead and only a little to the sides, but when faced with the hairpin turn, the vehicle almost fell off the side of the mountain! But the rules of the AI haven't changed much- just the sensors. If you're driving through jungle, for example, you have to have sensors that don't see leaves as obstacles. Otherwise the path will look totally impassable.

    3. Re:so wait.. by Zathrus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are several factors here. First and formost, the vehicles are more capable. The software is vastly better and the hardware is somewhat improved. Did you think that they've been sitting around doing nothing for the past 17 months? They've been working on improvements since the last challenge, and they've spent a lot more time actually testing their vehicles in desert terrain.

      There are some people who say that this year's course is far easier than last year's. I don't know myself -- I'm not involved with any of the teams and I don't have detailed knowledge of the courses. But there has been some commentary by those involved to this effect, as well as from bystanders. One huge difference is that the most difficult part of the course (Beer Bottle Pass, a narrow road with a steep drop off on one side) was at the end of the course this year, while the equivalent part was near the start last year. Stanford's leader is quoted as saying something to the effect that if they'd inverted last year's course then a lot of cars would've gone much further, even if none of them finished. The complete lack of media attention last year may have been one reason why DARPA swapped the course around -- it's rather anti-climactic to write about a race where the best racer hardly even got off the finish line and leads to the kind of stories DARPA really doesn't want to see (waste of taxpayer money, will never work, etc.).

      In any case, given that less than 25% of the vehicles finished, I'd hardly say that it was a trivial thing to do. It's still amazing. Congrats to those who did, and to all of those who participated for that matter -- it's quite an accomplishment, even if there's a long way to go still before this is really usable in a real world environment.

    4. Re:so wait.. by ViX44 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:so wait.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:so wait.. by Dun+Malg · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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.

      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
    7. Re:so wait.. by cloudmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!

    8. Re:so wait.. by Dun+Malg · · Score: 4, Informative
      So yeah, it seems utterly clear that the DOD has no plans to incorporate technologies for ground navigation into assault vehicles.

      Nice attempt to braoden and generalize, weasel. You said:

      "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."
      Clearly you're talking specifically about the Grand Challenge project, for which the time frame of "2010 to 2015" is relevant, and this is what I addressed. Stands to reason, as that's what this /. topic is about. You added in to word assault between "ground" and "vehicle" based on some internal editorial bias. I never claimed the DoD isn't interested in autonomous armed combat vehicles. I am simply stating the fact that the DARPA Grand Challenge is the preliminary step in developing an unmanned, unarmed, cargo carrier to be fielded in 2010-2015. This is what the linked DARPA site says. This is what all the articles say. You flasely claimed otherwise.
      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  2. Good news by Data+Link+Layer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Good news by cerberusss · · Score: 4, Funny
      Maybe in 20 years we can have auto driving cars

      I can already imagine the following scene:
      You: *steps in car* "Drive me to uncle George?"
      Car: "Why do you want me to drive to uncle George"
      You: "Because it's his birthday, dammit. Now start driving!"
      Car: "You seem to be a bit angry. Where does this anger come from?"
      You: "Start DRIVING you gas-guzzling piece of shit!"
      Car: *accelerates to 100mph* *dumps core*

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    2. Re:Good news by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Informative

      Funny building a car isn't that hard the power plant is rather complicated but the rest can be made of some nice tube stock and sheet metal for the most part. Granted it wont ride as nice as most commercial cars but it will stand up in an accident better than any of them. Granted I'm talking about good old fashion dune buggy with sheet metal attached. Never had any federal guide line issues just one state inspector made sure nothing would fall off and the wheels were covered.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
    3. Re:Good news by rjstanford · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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!
    4. Re:Good news by lowrydr310 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Is your dune buggy street legal?

      It's funny how our laws are written. I know a guy who built a Lamborghini Countach kit car out of some steel tubing, a pre-made fiberglass body, and an engine that isn't even close to passing federal emission laws. He had no problems getting it inspected, registered, and getting a license plate for it. Custom choppers are the same: It's easy to weld some tubing together and slap on wheels, an engine, and a transmission and you're out on the streets in no time!

      I want to import a new Toyota Hilux diesel pickup because a compact diesel pickup truck isn't available in the USA. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to do this because it hasn't been tested against US crash standards and the engine isn't EPA certified (despite being less polluting than just about any diesel engine currently offered in the USA).

  3. "MOVE OVER BUDDY" by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:"MOVE OVER BUDDY" by earthforce_1 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah but according to Moore's law, the robot cars should be able to break Mach 1 sometime around 2010.

      --
      My rights don't need management.
  4. How few remain by necro81 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:How few remain by knix · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I believe that team, Team ENSCO just blew a tire. They were doing very well and on pace to win I think until they had a mechanical malfunction, not a computer malfunction.

    2. Re:How few remain by zurmikopa · · Score: 5, Informative

      They blew a tire and were somewhere around 60 feet off course when they were eliminated, if I remember correctly.

      I know that a good number of the teams were actually still moving when they were eliminated; they had generally just wandered far enough off course that it was determined that they would be unable to finish.

      There were a number of reasons why people did so much better this year than last year.

      The biggest reason I think is that people knew a little better what to expect this year, and focused development on more important items for the race. For instance, for the first race I had done work on using a terrain database for path planning, but it turned out that the waypoints are so close together that it ends up just being a waste of CPU cycles for the most part.

      Another important reason is there was a rather large jump in the quality of the software running on the bots, and a moderate jump in the quality of the hardware. The integration was much more refined.

      Finally, the course was easier overall this year and the difficult part was put near the end. There was nothing in the course really comparable to Daggett ridge from the first race. Also, pretty much the entire course was graded along with the edges of the road often had banks. We had cliff detection that pretty much went unused this year due to this.

      Overall, it was a pretty good race this year. Stanford did an awesome job and really deserved the win. Not that you guys have that much interest, but we (Axion) ended up in 7th place (right after Ensco) with about 66 miles. We ended up getting stuck in some sand. The current candidate for the cause is a broken sway arm bracket that caused us to pull to the right a bit. Further analysis will be required to determine if that's actually the case.

  5. Re:Can you say... by antek9 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  6. The downside to this by Elrac · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  7. Re:19.1? by Schweg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:19.1? by jrboatright · · Score: 3, Informative

    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_

  9. Re:19.1? by necro81 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:Patriotism... sigh by reed · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  11. Stanford + Volkswagen by SamuraiMike · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Drivers unnecessary"

  12. More info by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Informative

    For far better info than the anemic (and completely flash based) gc.org site:

    http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/discussion.htm l -- DARPA's GC message boards
    http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/08/darpagrandchalle nge2005/ -- Was updated throughout the actual event. Best coverage I've seen yet.
    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!

  13. Quote from the winner by VeganBob · · Score: 5, Funny

    01001001001000000111000001110111011011100110010101 10010000100000011110010110111101110101001000000110 0001011011000110110000101110

    --
    Being funny is my sig nature.
  14. Driverless? by cciRRus · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  15. cmu won all three by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    sort of.

    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, ...) while i think palo alto has much better weather than pittsburgh :)

    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 :) 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
    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.

  16. Gray Team? by mikeee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Gray Team? by ET097 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I go to Tulane and I can think of about 5 Tulane students I know who helped with the bot at one point or another including one of my good friends. Tulane was mostly helping out with programming and I know they were using Java. The story I heard is the sailboat Gray Insurance had been spending money on sunk, so they decided to enter the grand challenge for fun. Luckily the car wasn't destroyed by Hurricane Katrina (they were keeping it about an hour outside of New Orleans). Some of the Tulane students stopped working with the project after the hurricane because they are attending school this semester in other states (since Tulane is closed right now), but a few of the guys took the semester off to work on it full time. As a side note, I am impressed that anything my friend touched actually worked and did what it was supposed to since I personally know his track record of breaking things over the past three years (including MY CAR).

  17. Re:Luckily... by CreatureComfort · · Score: 4, Informative


    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
  18. Why isn't this a bigger deal? by prozac79 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    --
    "Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
  19. Team Grey is the Real Winner by humankind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.