March 15, 2004
DARPA Grand Challenge Ends with a Whimper
Well, as I had predicted earlier, no vehicle finished the Grand Challenge. In fact, the one that went the farthest, went less than 8 miles. Which, by the way, is still a tremendously impressive feat. This just goes to illustrate the difficulty of doing autonomous navigation.
Posted by elkaim at March 15, 2004 4:40 PMThe Grand Challenge event was supposed to be a 10-hour sprint across the desert, with a $1 million prize to the designers of the first driverless vehicle to transit 142 miles of sand and rock from Barstow (San Bernardino County) to Primm, Nev., just across the state line.
But shortly after 11 a.m., Anthony Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon office that put up the prize, took the stage at a casino near the supposed finish line to announce: "The Grand Challenge ended about 10 minutes ago when the last 'bot went out.''
Despite the race's somewhat comic end -- the robotic dirt bike entered by an Albany man toppled two feet from the starting gate -- Tether said the competition had advanced DARPA's aim of spurring the development of driverless combat vehicles capable of fighting desert wars without putting soldiers in harm's way.
"It exceeded our expectation by the amount of people who showed up, and by the types of people who showed up,'' said Tether, saying the agency would probably stage a new challenge in a year or so after the volunteers have time "to get their batteries recharged.''
DARPA sponsored the Grand Challenge because a decade of government-funded contracts with defense firms has failed to produce breakthroughs. The agency hoped the prize and prestige of the challenge would entice academic and garage inventors to come up with new ideas. Tether said DARPA spent about $13 million to sponsor the event, and got more than its money's worth in promising new approaches.