March 09, 2004
Someone took his camera phone to the first test rounds for the Darpa Grand Challenge .
The challenge is to built an unmanned vehicle which has to find it's way through an unknown course from LA to Las Vegas. In the first test only two from the 6 challengers even made it past the start line and none of them made it to the finish. And this was only a simple obstacle course, in the real challenge the vehicles have to find their way past swamps, train tracks and populated areas. I hope they have a good insurance.
Wired News also has a story but it lacks the nice pics of a crashing robotized Honda Acura.
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Great post, mare! Is the gang at JPL too busy navigating Mars to show Darpa how it's done?
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It's a neat thing to have robot cars travelling across the deserts. I just wonder about the rights of the teams should they be successful. I looked around the DARPA Grand Challenge website, but I really couldn't find much to answer that question. Does DARPA have direct rights to what you create? Or are they simply using a project of this sort to as the article says "to accelerate the technology, and to reach out to those folks who ordinarily don't work for the Department of Defense" Overall though, this all sounds pretty damn cool - especially to a complete technical reject like myself.
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Bah, I wondered that too and could only find the same thing you found. They are also advertising elsewhere on the site for scientists and researchers that wouldn't ordinarily work for DARPA, so maybe this project is a part of that, too -- a way to draw scientists and future scientists into that field.
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I guess that strategy does make sense though. They allow people to show that they have basic skills in the development of unmanned vehicles - then I guess you hire those specific people/companies to develop some sort of military application. It seems that the technology they are using is all pretty widely avaialable and known. It all seems like it's about the implementation of that technology. I'd really like to see how these people can do with a huge budget and tonnes of specialized military equipment.
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All 15 self-navigating vehicles in a 150-mile race across the Mojave Desert were knocked out within a few miles of the starting gate Saturday, victims of technical glitches, barbed-wire fences and rugged terrain.
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Oh! All knocked out within seven miles! Darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn /Herman Munster DARPA had a live cast of the event, which of course I didn't see (wasted my day skiing instead of crouching over a computer - silly me). Darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn, darn ...