Slashdot Mirror
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."
I doubt that any of these teams will have turned a profit on this competition - do you have any idea how much it costs to field an entry, including staff, equipment, materials, entry fees etc?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Why do so many geeks appear to be more at home in soviet russia than in the free world?
What gives you the right to decide who can and can't have a car?
How we know is more important than what we know.
The most important thing is that the algorithms are written up and published in peer-reviewed journals. That understanding is more important than the code itself. My RoboCup robootic soccer team published all of its source code one year, and not much came of it; Some people used it but they didn't really understand it. It's also hard to take the code and make it work with a different robot, as all the customized hardware on the robot means a lot of porting, and uncovering bugs and design limitations. Also, competition code often has its design stretched to the limit by the time the competition arrives, and if you redid it you might design it differently to make it cleaner. So, our papers have probably helped many more people than our code ever did. I did release a library along with some papers explaining it, and that worked well. But that's just a small part of the overall codebase.
Of course, it would be nice to see the code out there, but the science is more important than the implementation. However, if we were talking about an off-the-shelf robot such as a roomba or aibo, the situation is quite different.
People like owning cars (and other things). There's a reason. It's related to this 'freedom' concept that I'm so big on. In fact, there's a whole school of thought that suggests that freedom is not possible without property. Somehow, this is counter-intuitive to some.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I almost laughed out loud when I saw pictures of MIT's pimped out Land Rover. Besides the numerous external sensors and other gear mounted on the vehicle, I read that there is so much internal equipment to manage everything that they had real heating issues that were solved by installing an additional air conditioner and a power generator to power the AC. This is what happens when you give some money and parts to a bunch of bright geeks with too much time.
I would be interested to know exactly what the scores where and how they were derived. From reading the Popular Mechanics (blog) and Register (blog) reports, it sounds like Stanford might have gotten a bit of the raw end of the stick.
Specifically, the Register is reporting that it DARPA counted the up to 20min Stanford's car was stuck sandwiched between two other cars due to Cornell's robot screwing up against it, and Popular Mechanics is reporting that DARPA says Stanford lost to Carnegie Mellon by about 20min.
Sounds like it would have been a extremely close race if DARPA had been applying more reasonable (from the principle of trying to eliminate luck as a large factor) accounting principles.
Well, the thing is it's a competition so I doubt that people would like to release their code for everyone else to profit off of. Also, I'd bet that some of the teams code specifically for the hardware they have, and it may or may not work on another platform. Our school competes in the underwater contest (only high school to compete heh) and right now our code is highly specific to our machine and our platform. With different pieces of hardware none of our code would work, although to be honest our code kind of fails at life so it doesn't do much anyway. If we hadn't procrastinated so much... but yeah, if it was noncompetitive and the teams used similar hardware then you might see some open source projects, but the way it is now I doubt it. Of course, some teams would do it out of the goodness of their hearts but even so the hardware problems might make it useful as a reference implementation at best. I do know that U of Florida has opensourced their JAUS implementation, but that is a specific protocol for Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) which isn't all that helpful in an unmanned competition.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Try getting out of your own area then. It will broaden your horizons.
Y'all is prominent in Oklahoma,Missouri,California,Maryland, Virginia, Texas, Louisiana(all states that I have lived in). In my travels, most of the south and southwest in the USA will let you experience the whole y'all extravaganza.
It's to the point that when I here something other than y'all, I take notice. South central Pennsylvania was the worst with you'uns instead of y'all for me.(as I type this I notice that Firefox's spell-checker does not flag y'all, but with you'uns I get the RED UNDERLINE!!! Oh No!..the dreaded Red Underline!)
Your use of the quote marks on the word 'word' suggests that you do not think that it is a word.
Try again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y'all Obligatory wiki link
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?dict=A&key=yall*1+0 Cambridge's onlin dictionary
http://www.yourdictionary.com/y-all Random link from Google search for online dictionaries
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/y'all And last but not least, Merriam-Webster's online dictionary.
So like it or not, y'all need to get over the fact that the USA is a big country with diverse cultures and dialects...just like any other big country.
Take a trip up north from Virginia...oh, say about 4-5 states right along the same Atlantic coast and be amazed.
Y'all will see a bunch of stuff, you'uns will get to try a lot of different cuisine, youse guys will experience different cultures, and you all will maybe learn something...maybe even some tolerance for those not just like you guys.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Similar tech is in use daily on large farms, but it is a rigidly defined route. Self steering tractors are very common now, there are even kits you can get that bolt on to your normal tractor. They are more intended for keeping precise plowing/tilling/planting etc spacing, where inches count highly, but using GPS and maps of the fields they work perfectly fine. If there was a dedicated lane next to existing freeways for slow and steady cargo delivery-separating human drivers from the bot drivers- this could be done today fairly easily I think using similar off the shelf stuff. The darpa challenge is way more about building autonomous robotic fighting vehicles/ military convoy vehicles (Read the oshkosh terramax site, why they are using that large truck in their efforts, it is a direct sales model if they can get it to work right, as they didn't this test), and as such needs to be loads more complicated than just following a wide and clear road with traffic all flowing the same direction, etc. One of the larger problems is off the wall events that can't be adequately programmed for in advance and have to rely on sensors, like the random deer out in the road, people running across the highway, "road gators" and other unexpected trash in the road, stuff like that. In a military situation, perhaps they wouldn't bother, smash their way through, but still try to not run over all the locals during the trip.
I think it is going to be really hard to come up with a civilian model that would work on all roads, just too many variables to contend with. In a war situation they can afford to be a little more sloppy in the collateral damage department (from their point of view, not the other guys of course). They want to pull expensive humans out of the mix as much as possible, while still retaining near the same level functionality. On a civilian road during non war conditions, the quality of the self steering needs to be loads better.
On the contrary, freedom -> anarchy. It's stronger, though--freedom actually implies anomie, not just anarchy.
If I am prevented from enslaving you, I am not free. Note that this does disrupt the nice, convenient association between "freedom" and "good".