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Carnegie Mellon Wins Urban Challenge
ThinkingInBinary writes "The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order."
a nice link to Wired blog entries (from the darpa site) http://blog.wired.com/defense/urban_challenge/index.html
Actually, according to the Wired blog, MIT came in fourth, although the other teams were not mentioned.
All three teams took development money from DARPA. As such, DARPA gets a copy of all software and development notes that the teams produced.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Driving is a privilage, not a right.
Did you miss all the expensive equipment mounted on the car? Have you ever entered an engineering competition? Almost all teams take commercial sponsors, annd rarely do teams make a profit - after all, you only solicit as many sponsors as it takes to get the project built.
Actually, this is a good example of something that would not be helped by the open source development model. How many hobbyists do you think have a multi-million dollar vehicle outfitted with all the necessary sensors and computers? And of those, how many do you think have a large testing area? And of those, how many have a team of people to prep the car and testing area for each test run?
Most of the teams in the UC spent more on their car than was offered in prize money. They still profit because a lot of that spending was subsidized by corporations (note the logos all over the cars). Nonetheless, the money has to come from somewhere. Without the car, sensors, and testing area, an open source contributor could only look for the most obvious bugs.
Now, what they should release are their algorithms and design methods. But making the actual source code development open source would not help the state of the art progress "gigantically." Remember also that these machines are often purpose built using some amount of custom hardware. What works with one setup and for one car type will not necessarily work for another. It's like saying Open Darwin helps Microsoft. It could, in theory, help a few things, but most are so inherently incompatible that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Here.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Having the cutest team member!
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/TeamAnnieway.asp
It was this team that has opensourced the software: http://www.ubcthunderbird.com/ code found here (sf.net). Unfortunately they didn't make it through to the finals...
I was at the race and Tartan Racing won fair and square. First, their bot started about 20 minutes after Stanford because they had some issues with some electrical interference coming from a nearby Jumbotron television (yes crazy I know). Stanford was paused for the MIT versus Cornell collision and was also paused a bit for Cornell's 10 minute stop and go routine on Nevada street. That was when Stanford's Junior decided to car hop from way back in line to the 2nd behind Cornell. Both Stanford and Tartan (CMU) ran well and were very smooth, but Boss was a bit more aggressive on the straight aways. Here's race video footage so you can see yourself - http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34687/113/
Someone recorded the webcast of the finals: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3873219/DARPA_Urban_Challenge_Final_Event