It’s Not a Mirage: Robots Roam the Mojave Desert Sands
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced the completion of the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005. Twenty-three robotic ground vehicles competed in a desert road test designed to advance autonomous technologies that could one day save lives on the battlefield. The DARPA Grand Challenge final event was held Saturday, October 8, in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada. The finalists traversed a rugged desert course, featuring lakebeds, narrow desert roads, tight turns, tunnels, gateways and treacherous mountain passes. The actual course was not revealed to teams until two hours before the event began at approximately 6:30 a.m. (PDT). The team whose vehicle traversed the entire course the fastest in under ten hours won $2 million. The finalists, in alphabetical order, are: Axion Racing (Westlake Village, Calif.), Team Cajunbot (Lafayette, La.), Team CalTech (Pasadena, Calif.), CIMAR (Gainesville, Fla.), Team Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y.), Team DAD (Morgan Hill, Calif.), Desert Buckeyes (Ohio State University, Columbus), Team ENSCO (Springfield, Va.), The Golem Group/UCLA (Los Angeles), The Gray Team (Metairie, La.), Insight Ra cing (Cary, N.C.), Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems I (Littleton, Colo.), Mitre Meteorites (McLean, Va.), MonsterMoto (Cedar Park, Tex.), Mojavaton (Grand Junction, Colo.), Princeton University (Princeton, N.J.), Red Team (Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh), Red Team Too (Carnegie-Mellon), SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering, (Thousand Oaks, Calif.), Stanford Racing Team (Palo Alto, Calif.), Team Terra Max (Oshkosh, Wis.), Virginia Tech Team Rocky (Blacksburg, Va.), Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team. The finalists were selected at the conclusion of an intense eight-day semifinal known as the National Qualification Event (NQE), held at the California Speedway at Fontana, Calif., from September 28 through October 5. Forty-three robots of many shapes and sizes took turns pursuing a series of 2.2-to-2.7-mile courses designed to resemble desert conditions. The semifinalists had been chosen from among 195 original applicants; over the past several months, DARPA narrowed the field to the 43 semifinalists through a series of qualifying activities, including in-person site visits by DARPA officials to assess the capabilities of the various robots. “In 2004, we thought it was quite an achievement that a robot was able to go about seven and one half miles,” said DARPA Director Dr. Tony Tether. “But the results of this NQE tell me that we will leave that in the dust of the Mojave!” The vehicle that completed the course in the shortest amount of time was “Stanley,” entered by Stanford University. The team won the $2 million prize because it finished the entire course in the shortest elapsed time under 10 hours — six hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds. Grand Challenge Program Manager Ron Kurjanowicz added, “The DARPA Grand Challenge is a truly powerful mix of American ingenuity, team spirit, competitiveness, entrepreneurship, engineering and computer science. And while the teams have a strong competitive streak, we’ve seen many teams help each other during the NQE.” “We established the Grand Challenge to foster the development of autonomous vehicle technology that will some day save the lives of Americans protecting our country on the battlefield,” said Tether. “The quality of this field is strong evidence that we are succeeding.”