Robotica Exotica

The DARPA Urban Challenge

Only three years after the initial DARPA Grand Challenge, where not a single vehicle made it past the 7 mile mark, several teams have succesfully managed to complete the vastly more complicated Urban Challenge.

Though I was not present, my own brother-in-law road tripped down to southern California to see the event. He described that each of the vehicles had personality and that his own estimate of when we would be chauffeured by autonomous vehicles went from 50 years to much less.

This article in the New Scientist describes exactly that personality phenomenon.

A sports utility vehicle with a mind of its own was declared the winner of DARPA's urban robot car race on Sunday. It travelled autonomously through traffic for six hours and 60 miles (100 kilometres) around a ghost town in California, US, to scoop the prize.

Nicknamed Boss, the vehicle developed at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, won a $2 million prize in the third such race sponsored by the US Department of Defense, which wants military supply vehicles to one day drive themselves.

The entrants included several station wagons and a huge green military truck decked out with flashing lights, warning sirens, spinning laser range finders and cameras. Only six of 11 finalists finished the course, at an abandoned military base, on Saturday.

The winners of the DARPA Urban Challenge were decided overnight, based on their ability to steer safely around the course, as well as their speed. Stanford University, which won a 2005 race, came in second and Virginia Tech finished third.

One of the best write-ups that I saw on the urban challenge is a series of posts on a blog I read called Due Diligence:

Looking at the crowds at the 2007 Urban Challenge, you'd be forgiven for wondering if DARPA has touched off another of the famous side-effects from its research projects.

The event was open and free to the public. While the teams and DARPA staff were present for the duration, the spectators came and went through the day, making it hard to judge the crowd. But I'd say at least a third and maybe half of the attendees were fans. Some seemed to have found a new kind of southern California entertainment.

In reality, the goals of DARPA and the tastes of race fans are in conflict. Safety and reliability aren't usually compatible with speed and risk. (There could be a future for autonomous bot races on the tube, however. Rumor had it that the presence of Discovery Channel talent indicated a forthcoming special or mini-series on the Urban Challenge.)

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The Urban Challenge vehicles are also prototypes, and most teams will readily admit it. Sensors protrude, need to be cleaned periodically, and flake out from RFI, sun glare and dust. Server room rack mounts or Apple's consumer machines crammed into cargo areas are hardly milspec. The uniformed armed forces attendees on Friday were invariably polite, but I'm sure a number of them later had a good laugh considering how these machines would bear up in the heat, vibration and dirt of the sand box.

Miniaturization, environmental hardening, integration, testing and on and on. All of these are capital intensive, are required before seeing a return on the investment, and are beyond the charter or means of academic researchers and do-it-yourself teams. The barrier to entry is going up rapidly.

My hat is off to the teams, 6 out of 11 which finished the race. This is truly a difficult task, and the teams that accomplished this have much to be proud of.