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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."
How far this technology has come in just a few years is (ridiculously) amazing. Major kudos to everyone who's brought this so far!
I only wish that one of the conditions of winning was to release the software that powered your car - can you imagine how much farther things would have come if everyone could build on the previous years' winners? So much brilliant coding has gone into this, but so much of it is just reinventing the wheel. (...Ouch.) But in all honesty, the state of the art would progress gigantically if one of the winners would GPL their car-driving software.
if it was open source, the car would first ask you to load kld_brake_for_kids. After struggling with that for a few days you'd get on the road only to find you crash into a tree because the cars hardware isn't compatible, and some guy on /. would tell you it's ok because you have the source and can write your own do not crash into tree's module.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
No, no open source code. But what the public does get out of this is advances in technology. Case in point: the *real* winners of this year's Urban Challenge are Velodyne. Their lidar sensor was invented by team DAD for the 2005 challenge. For the 2007 challenge, they decided that instead of losing the competition again, they would sell their lidar technology to the other teams. Over half of the 35 teams in the challenge bought one, and 5 of the 6 finishers (Virginia Tech being the exception).
This thing is a huge advance over previous technology for this application, and it directly owes its existence to this challenge. Thanks to DARPA, you can now buy a lidar that you can stick on top of a car and which gives you 360 degree range data in 3D at 10 Hz over Ethernet. Now that the company is jump-started, next year those specs will improve, costs will go down, and eventually something like this will be driving your car for you. That's the benefit everyone gets from this competition. Not to mention all the people whose imaginations have been captured by the competition; who have been working on the funding DARPA gave out, getting their PhDs, or even just working in their spare time, learning how to write the software to run these things. There's no doubt in my mind that DARPA has gotten far more mileage from their money in this contest than they would have dumping it in the accounts of some defense contractor.
So even though no open source was produced from the contest, the public will see a lot of benefit from the money DARPA has spent.
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