Here is a nice article on some of the competitors of the DARPA Grand Challenge. I think that it is a great project by DARPA, but I'm not sure that any of the competitors will win this year.
In an empty parking lot a few miles from Gregory's garage, that goal seems far away. Bob Addison and Wayne Gothmiller, two Sciautonics team members, are slowly guiding an old golf cart around the pavement. A LIDAR sensor—a sort of laser-mapping device—is mounted on the front of the cart, hooked up to a laptop computer in the passenger seat, connected in turn to a small generator. They drive a few feet forward, crawling along, then stop and check the computer screen to figure out what the sensor saw. On race day the technology on this puttering, halting golf cart will need to guide the Prowler as it bounces through riverbeds at 60 mph. Nobody said building a robot car would be easy.Posted by elkaim at February 16, 2004 3:13 PMOr cheap. Sciautonics expects that it will cost about $250,000 for the team to put together its vehicle. And unlike the teams from Caltech, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon, members can't rely on large amounts of university funding.