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Eleven Finalists in Pentagon's Robotic Rally
An anonymous reader writes "A mere 11 driverless vehicles — not the 20 originally planned — will compete in this weekend's $3.5 million all-robot street rally, hosted by the Pentagon. After a series of crashes, dangerous turns, and aimless wanderings off of the course, the rest of the robo-cars in the "Urban Challenge" were deemed unsafe to compete."
It seems totally out of whack that they'd disqualify entries that wandered all over the track, went the wrong direction down roads, crashed into multiple objects, and generally were a menace on the road.
After all, they still let women drive.
"It would be terrible for one bot to take out another"
So when is that event scheduled, and will it be on pay per view?
I agree that they were too restrictive.
Seeing the vidoes on YouTube like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh-B3rysxIA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7La09EBLf-Q
or stories about people driving into lakes and flooded roads "because GPS told them to"
man who went to the back of his RV while still on the highway to have some coffee, when he crashed, he sued the company for not stating in the manual that "the car does not turn by itself"
truck driver who drove his lorry into a river, not knowing that the bridge he intended to use was no longer there
etc
I'd say pass the control to the machines as soon as possible....
My money is on the team from Cyberdyne Systems
So... how exactly are these cars any different than most of the drivers already on the road?
I was thinking, "Cool! This is as close as we are going to get to: Ninjas vs. Robots." I need more coffee. ;-)
Words cannot describe...
Not when all you have to do is paint your car blue and it can't be detected, or the contestant claim that obstacles should be on the ground and NOT of a railroad crossing type (bar hanging in the air).
Oh yeah, that is some excellent tech,it only works if we can blue. And it is apparently totally acceptable that the car only looks at the ground, not up in the air (how will it deal with tunners/bridges/powerlines?
Yes, it is cute and all, but frankly we have been seeing this tech for a long time now and it just does not seem to be getting any better. None of the robots seem capable of really "seeing" their enviroment. They have sensors that switch between states if something pre-exepected comes in range. Not nearly good enough for real life use.
We have robot systems that can work in controlled enviroments, but that ain't the contest here. Remember what we are trying to do here, get vehicles to drive around urban settings in times of war. The unexpected is expected. How will any of these things cope if they can't even deal with normal things that just weren't explicitly listed?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I guess it makes sense if you think about it, but it seems a bit weird that it's much easier to design and build a plane that flies itself than a car that drives itself.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The only bit that I really wonder about with UAVs is how they avoid (1) collision with each other (as their use seems to increase and (2) interference with other flying objects (Campbell mobile phones, airlines etc :-).
And I'd really like to know if one's overhead - with a crash there is a serious chance of these things dropping, say, in the middle of traffic. Altitude + gravity makes for an awful lot of kinetic energy to disperse on impact..
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Well at least they haven't shot anyone yet.
That seems to be the current trend in military robot failures.
My robot does this too....it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls.
Just like woman drivers, I guess.
I worked for the Kuwait Embassy many years ago, and heard a different version from the secretaries there. At that time, Kuwaiti students had their tuition paid at American Colleges, and $50,000 "spending money" (!) - provided they kept a certain GPA. Our software tracked their GPA, "stipend" payments, and sent warning letters when their GPA started slipping - something about enjoying the weather this time of year on an oil platform in the Baltic sea. As the story goes, one student was a big fan of US technology. He bought a fully decked out van, with cruise control, and a top of the line stereo. So he starts down the freeway, turns on the cruise control, and goes to the back to listen to the stereo...
...actually - his car is the one that got "clotheslined" in the link from the summary.
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Anyway - I heard Wed. that they were out of the competition - more-or-less arbitrarily. It sounds to me like DARPA already knew, going in to this, who they wanted the finalists to be. Stanford (the previous winner), CMU, Oshkosh - they're all there.
Last time DARPA basically did the same thing to Team Jefferson. They just said "you guys are done" when they showed up to re-try a test -- after they'd spent 30+ hours doing energency repairs after hitting a barrier. I'm getting the distinct impression they don't want anybody small in this thing. TJ has spent a fraction of the other teams' development costs and for some reason that scares DARPA.
And one man could command a tank division. No other humans involved. Quite a centralisation of power.
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That's better odds than the people they're giving licenses to in this country.
As the head of a team that lost in 2005, I don't think so. The 2005 competition was run fairly. The Marine colonel who ran the thing was tough, but fair. The only extra consideration I saw given to a team was that CMU got to have a Discovery Channel camera crew in the starting gate area, which, under the rules, was limited to two people per team.
In the Urban Challenge, if you hit a stationary object, you weren't ready to compete at that level. Back in 2004, 'bots were hitting stationary obstacles all over the place. Some went off road and rolled over. Oshkosh Truck/OSU not only hit a parked SUV, it pushed it for a while until someone hit the remote emergency stop. (That's why Oshkosh Truck dumped OSU, pulled the project in-house, and finished in 2005, using their huge truck.) CMU hit a fence placed by DARPA just before the event. CMU's vehicle, in 2004, wasn't really autonomous, just preprogrammed. They had a trailer full of people manually planning the route in the two hours before the event, using data obtained via overflights of the area with LIDAR-equipped aircraft. The 2004 Grand Challenge was embarrassing for everyone involved, including DARPA. The press reports made it look like a joke.
In 2005, everybody who made it to Fontana had something better than anybody had in 2004. There were very few collisions. It was striking, being at the raceway in Fontana, and seeing 43 large, autonomous vehicles, all of which basically worked. There'd been enormous progress in a year and a half. Mobile robotics wasn't a joke any more. We were out of the Comedy Channel/Robot Wars era, and into the ESPN/NASCAR era. With NASCAR-sized budgets for some teams, but not all. Some small teams were successful. Although "small", in this game, means mid six figures to low seven figures.
This year, DARPA insists you not hit anything. Urban Challenge vehicles have to drive in traffic. There are cars with human drivers on the course. Complaining about being eliminated after a collision with a stationary barrier is just whining.
Yeah, I hate it when those damn Ambulances, Fire Engines, and Police Cruisers just tear through the neighborhood with their sirens blaring and those damn lights flashing. Where do they get off driving ninety miles an hour, ignoring stop signs, refusing to yield the right of way, and cutting off pedestrian traffic?
How dare they! I mean, it isn't like anyone's life is on the line, right?
In the article Safety Last for Robo-Cars, Jefferson team member Janie Perrone said, "...I think he jinxed us." Well, with such medieval thinking, the Jefferson team should count their lucky stars that they weren't all burned as witches.
Every time I open my RSS reader I cant stop reading "Elven Finalists in Pentagon's Robotic Rally". That would be a notice...
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp