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Inside DARPA's Robot Race

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ghost-cars dept.

Belfegor writes "The PBS series Nova has a great feature on their website, regarding the coverage of the DARPA-sponsored 'Robot Race' in which driverless vehicles 'competed' in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. The full show is available on the website, and besides that they have plenty more information about the robotics behind the challenge, and also some pretty cool out-takes from the show."

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night. by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Interesting


    I will say, I was impressed, and surprised that I did not see an article on it at /.. I believe there was one last year.

    I will say, that aside from "Stanley" winning the race on completion and time, I also believe that Stanley was the best technology. The H1lander and friend were micromanaged, and there were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair) and it took almost the whole 2 hours of a team of people to map out the course and program the robots. They then added the fudge factor for human error with the fast and slow strategies.

    Stanley was programmed in minutes of receiving the map, and it calculated its speed dynamically on its own. Stanley had "adaptive vision" which overlaid laser, video, and other sensory data to create a dynamic field of view of what was safe to drive through.

    Now, what shocked me, was that so many teams finished this year. Nobody got past 7 or 9 miles last year, and many vehicles passed the entire 132 mile trip this year. Watching the vehicles drive was impressive. Most of the time, they appeared to be manned.

    The course was not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. With the success of Stanley, I believe that this will increase the adaptive and learning capabilities in current software controlled systems. Currently, software is brute forced into trying to accommodate all possible logical conditions, which is impossible, and often just wrong.

  2. Re:You almost never see the words by Jett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hadn't heard about it being for an autonomous gun platform. I watched the show last night and they presented it as purely for supply transports. They specifically mentioned Jessica Lynch and how she was just a truck driver who should never of been exposed to combat. They also mentioned that the DOD want's 1/3rd of their transport trucks to be autonomous within 10 years.

  3. but would it work? by lardlad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So DARPA funds this to create autonomous supply vehicles, which might work in a traditional battle with clearly drawn front lines and relatively secure transport routes behind the lines.

    It seems to me like 21st century warfare is a whole different animal - how hard would it be for a motivated, talented individual to figure out some simple attacks for the navigation systems on these vehicles, and get loads of sweet US munitions delivered to their doorstep? How effective would one of these vehicles be in an urban setting? How easy would it be to create a series of obstacles that would paralyze one of these vehicles?

    It's amazing technology, for sure, and the Stanford and CMU teams deserve kudos. I'm just concerned that with the current rush to technological solutions and shift away from "boots on the ground", this technology will be in battle zones far too quickly.