Robots behind the wheel in desert race

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Perhaps appropriate of a car race scheduled to be held in the desert outside Las Vegas on Saturday, 23 teams battled long odds to make it into a most unusual competition.

This is no ordinary race. The competitors are artificially intelligent robots designed to drive autonomously, and they're facing tough terrain: A 150-mile desert course with mountain switchbacks, gullies, dry lake beds, tunnels and manmade obstacles. And the computer scientists who developed the robot racers have to balance care with speed; the robots must finish the course in under 10 hours.

"Everyone has to place a bet down on speed," said Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist who is director of Stanford University's artificial-intelligence laboratory.
Stanford Racing Team's "Stanley," a modified Volkswagen Touareg V5, is one of the finalists announced Thursday by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development unit of the U.S. Department of Defense that sponsors the desert race.

Carnegie Mellon University's entrant, called Sandstorm, was last year's best-performing robot. This year, CMU has two cars competing. H1lander, a modified Hummer that will hold the pole position in the Saturday race, and Sandstorm, which will leave in third position 10 minutes later.

Truth is, the odds are stacked against all of them. Last year, CMU's Red Team, the best finisher, made it across only 7.3 miles of the 144-mile course in the Mojave Desert before burning out. No one claimed the $1 million prize.

"In 2004, we thought it was quite an achievement that a robot was able to go about seven and a half miles," DARPA director Tony Tether said. "But the results of this (year's semifinals) tell me that we will leave that in the dust of the Mojave."

This year, the prize is $2 million, and researchers hope their robot racers will fare better. The teams just finished eight days' worth of semifinals at the California Speedway in Fontana, Calif. Forty-three robots took turns driving 2.2- to 2.7-mile courses designed to resemble desert conditions. The semifinalists were chosen from among 195 original applicants.

The semifinal course wasn't easy. It included a 100-foot-long tunnel, more than 100 cones, gates, parked cars and piles of tires. One motorcycle robot crashed into a metal obstacle, but was able to get itself back up onto the course with the use of metal legs and carefully timed speed. Another robot ran over hay bails and ignited them. DARPA, with the use of a remote control that can pause or disable a vehicle, stopped the car and pulled it from the race.

According to several competitors, the course was altered over the eight days to prevent memorization by the robots and ensure it was more difficult each day.

Several teams finished the courses, including Stanley, Terra Max and CMU's Hummers.

Just two weeks before the semifinals, H1lander rolled over on a practice run. But during the semifinals, things went smoothly except for running over a few obstacles.

"No one can yet say what it takes to succeed in the Grand Challenge since the race hasn't occurred and the challenge hasn't been met," said professor Red Whittaker, Red Team leader, Carnegie Mellon Robotics.

The robots can drive themselves with the use of radar, vision and laser sensors fastened to the cars that can act as early warning systems, detecting close and far-range obstacles. They also draw on GPS (Global Positioning System) sensors to trace many steps.

In Stanley's case, Thrun and a team of computer scientists wrote more than 100,000 lines of code to tell it what to do. A map tells the car where to drive; a planning tool points out unsafe terrain; and a controller translates all of that into action. The software runs on six Pentium M processors, Intel-made, low-power chips originally designed for the telecommunications industry.

The race was devised by DARPA when the government asked it to produce a fleet of autonomously driven vehicles by 2015. The Grand Challenge calls on the expertise of computer scientists--whether in private business or academia--to develop the high-tech vehicles and race for the prize. DARPA hopes to use the technologies for vehicles that could one day drive onto a battlefield without endangering soldiers.

The racers won't know the exact details or location of the course until two hours before the race in Primm Valley, Nev., which begins at 6:30 a.m PDT. That way, contestants won't be able to test the course beforehand and prime their vehicles.

Among the other teams racing in the second annual DARPA Grand Challenge are Team CalTech of Pasadena, Calif.; Team Cornell from Ithaca, N.Y.; Desert Buckeyes from Ohio State University; Mojavaton from Grand Junction, Colo.; MonsterMoto from Cedar Park, Texas; Team Terra Max from Oshkosh, Wis.; Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems I from Littleton, Colo.; and Virginia Tech Team Rocky from Blacksburg, Va.

Also competing in the race are Axion Racing, from Westlake Village, Calif.; Team Cajunbot, from Lafayette, La.; CIMAR, from Gainesville, Fla.; Team DAD, from Morgan Hill, Calif.; Team ENSCO, from Springfield, Va.; the Golem Group/UCLA, from Los Angeles; the Gray Team, from Metairie, La.; Insight Racing, from Cary, N.C; Mitre Meteorites, from McLean, Va.; Princeton University; SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., and the Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team.

The challenge "is a truly powerful mix of American ingenuity, team spirit, competitiveness, entrepreneurship, engineering and computer science," said Ron Kurjanowicz, Grand Challenge program manager.

Source: CNet

 

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On Saturday, the Stanford Racing Team's robotic car, "Stanley," drove autonomously across 131.6 miles in the Mojave Desert in six hours and 53 minutes, finishing about 11 minutes faster than Carnegie Mellon's "Sandstorm." Its average speed was 19.1 mph, versus Sandstorm's 18.6 mph.

The Stanford University team, which takes home the $2 million prize, also beat two other unmanned robotic vehicles to finish the DARPA Grand Challenge's rugged course in fewer than 10 hours, the race's allotted time.

All of the teams made history during the weekend, however. They were the first autonomous vehicles to travel far within a specific time frame, as well as the first to finish the 2-year-old military race.

"These vehicles haven't just achieved world records, they've made history," said DARPA Director Tony Tether.

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the research and development unit of the U.S. Department of Defense.

DARPA had set out several years ago to foster new technologies for unmanned vehicles in the military, under mandate from Congress. The government has mandated that 30 percent of Army vehicles be unmanned by 2015 in order to save lives on the battlefield. And it approved research funds to be used for the Grand Challenge, which called on academia and private industry to build driverless cars with advanced technologies. The 2004 Challenge failed to produce a qualifier or winner: Sandstorm drove roughly 7 miles of the race before spinning its wheels.

"We have completed our mission here and are looking forward to seeing these exciting technologies take off," Tether said.

A DARPA spokesman said Saturday in a press conference that that likely means the end of the Grand Challenge.

"I don't think we will have another race like this in 2006," he said. "We wouldn't know how to top this one."

In a classic tale of protege overtaking mentor, Sebastian Thrun's team finished before that of CMU's Red Team's Sandstorm and Red Team Too's H1ghlander, which were both headed by Red Whittaker. Thrun was once an assistant professor at CMU under Whittaker, who's widely considered a leader in the field of robotics.

CMU's Sandstorm, the best-performing robot in 2004's Grand Challenge, and H1ghlander were considered favorites in the race, given Whittaker's expertise and that of the team, which was sponsored by Caterpillar, Google and Target. H1ghlander started first in Saturday's race, at 6:40 a.m. PDT, with Stanley beginning roughly 10 minutes later. (The robots' start times were staggered to avoid collisions.)

But toward the second half of the race for Stanley and H1ghlander, Stanley overtook the Hummer as first on the course. It had run up several times behind H1ghlander before, but DARPA had paused the robot until a better time to have it pass.

"That was a turning point in the race," said Thrun, referring to the point when he realized Stanley had been paused for a minute to create distance, rather than falling out of the race because of a malfunction.

"From that point on, Stanley was faster," Thrun said.

H1ghlander finished the race in seven hours and 14 minutes, at an average speed of 18.2 mph.

Perhaps the best underdog story comes from the fourth finalist in the challenge: The Gray Team's "Kat 5," which finished the race in seven hours and 30 minutes at an average speed of 17.5 mph.

The Gray Team was privately funded by Louisiana-based Gray Insurance, whose computer department, along with students from Tulane University, worked on Kat 5 during the past five to six months while two destructive hurricanes hit the state. The family behind Gray Insurance read about the race in Popular Science and wanted to contribute to national security by developing competitive technology.

The car is a modified Ford Escape hybrid with solar panels on top, which served as alternate power for the car.

"We only wanted to get 7 miles, like CMU did last year, and have fun. So we already won," said Denver Gray, the 18-year-old son of the team's leaders who worked on Kat 5.

TerraMax, a 16-ton Oshkosh Truck, finished the course, but not within the allotted 10 hours. DARPA had to stop the robot on Saturday evening because of nightfall, after the vehicle had been paused for a lengthy time, and then had it resume the course on Sunday morning.

"I thought it would be a race about qualifying, not time," Thrun said. "It's a victory for all of us."

There was an impressive roster of attendees and team members at the race. Google co-founder Larry Page was there, accompanying Andy Rubin, founder of Android, which was recently bought by the search giant. Executives from Boeing, Intel, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Volkswagen and others were also in attendance.