ORO GRANDE, Calif.--Three robots finished the DARPA Urban Challenge within the allotted time Saturday, a new milestone in the development of self-driving vehicles.
In the running for the $2 million first prize and $1 million second prize are Stanford University's robotic VW Passat, Virginia Tech's modified Ford Escape Hybrid, and Carnegie Mellon's autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe. These teams finished the urban challenge's three missions within the allotted six hours and without significant problems.
CMU's driverless car, Boss, crossed the finish line a couple of minutes after Stanford's Junior, but the robot started nearly 40 minutes after Stanford.
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET Networks)Other teams, including the Ben Franklin Racing Team's robotic Toyota Prius, also completed the course, but it's uncertain whether it crossed the finish line in time given various stops in the race.
DARPA plans to name the winners Sunday after compiling and evaluating all of its data on the race vehicles, including data on their speed and compliance with basic traffic rules. DARPA officials had said that the fastest car wouldn't necessarily win if it didn't pass all of the driving rules.
But DARPA Director Tony Tether said that he hadn't seen anything egregious among the first three finalists.
"We have a winner," Tether said in an interview with CNET News.com here at the former George Air Force Base.
Stanford University's robot car Junior crossed the finish line first, but it's unclear whether it will take first prize like it did in the 2005 Grand Challenge, a 132-mile race across the Nevada desert.
CMU's robot Boss followed Junior across the finish line a couple of minutes later, but Boss had started the race as much as 40 minutes after Junior left the starting gate. It was scheduled to leave the starting gate first early Saturday, but it experienced technical problems involving interference with its Global Positioning System, thanks to a local Jumbotron. So CMU gained significant time throughout its three required missions in the day.
Virginia Tech's team, VictorTango, crossed the finish line third. The team was first to leave the starting gate around 8 a.m. and it completed its first two missions first.
ORO GRANDE, Calif.--After two hours in the race, three teams have fallen out of the DARPA Urban Challenge, leaving eight driverless cars to finish the urban course.
So far, Team Oshkosh, Team Annieway, and Intelligent Vehicle Systems have been eliminated from the challenge for various reasons.
Oshkosh Truck's TerraMax truck is eliminated from the race after nearly running into an old shopping center.
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET Networks)Team Oshkosh, a more than 24,000 pound Oshkost truck, nearly ran into an old shopping center here at the former George Air Force Base after it ran over a parking lot curb. The team of Intelligent Vehicle Systems, a collaboration with Honeywell, Ford, and Delphi, had difficultly negotiating what to do at a stop sign.
Without those three teams, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon are among the eight teams remaining in the race.
A little after 10 a.m. PDT, Virginia Tech's VictorTango team completed its first mission in the challenge, after which it moved back to the starting shoot. Stanford University's robot Junior had already completed its first route, too.
After finishing a mission, the robot receives another mission definition file, or MDF, a USB connector with waypoints on the course to guide the robot's basic navigation. Teams must complete three missions total in six hours.
As Virginia Tech hit a milestone, the team of the University of Central Florida hit something else. The robot, Knight Rider, ran into an abandoned house on the course. It remains to be seen whether Knight Rider will be cut from the contestants.
ORO GRANDE, Calif.--This is the experiment of all robot experiments.
In 30 minutes, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will unleash 11 driverless cars on a 10-plus mile course here at the former George Air Force Base, as part of its $3.5 million robot race, the Urban Grand Challenge. It will be the first time DARPA has tested fully autonomous cars (with "no animals or midgets inside") driving on a course with other robots, as part of a test of the technology's capabilities as well as its safety, according to Norman Whitaker, DARPA Urban Challenge program manager.
DARPA's Norman Whitaker
(Credit: Stefanie Olsen/CNET Networks)"This is truly the first time we've taken robots and watched them interact with other robots," Whittaker said here Saturday before the start of the race. "They have not interacted so far."
As part of the competition, the robot cars must complete several driving missions within six hours at the closed air force base, which the government currently uses for military operations training in urban environments. The base is much like an environment where the government hopes to deploy autonomous cars by 2015 to complete missions like checking fence borders or clearing airport paths at night, Whittaker said.
On Saturday, the cars will be tested on driving skills much like they were 15-year-olds taking their California driver's exam for the first time, he said. They'll be faced with navigating four-way intersections, merging in traffic, and driving on the highway. About 100 officials from DARPA will be out on the field in safety boxes with ticket books, compiling data on how the cars perform and whether they're following basic traffic rules.
The robots may go as fast as 40 miles per hour on the highway, but watching the driverless cars move even at 10 miles per hour, "it catches your attention," Whitaker said. If there are difficulties on the course, each robot car has a so-called e-stop system installed that lets DARPA stop the car at any time.
In 2006, DARPA chose nine "track A" teams to receive $1 million in grant money to support their development efforts. Of those teams, only seven made it to the finals here Saturday. The seven track A finalists include Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Honeywell Aerospace Advanced Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oshkosh Truck, Stanford University, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
The four teams with $1 million from the government that didn't make the cut: Autonomous Solutions from Utah; the California Institute of Technology, The Golem Group from Santa Monica, Calif., and Raytheon from Tucson, Ariz.
DARPA plans to name a winner (or not) on Sunday after compiling all of the data it collects from the race. That's no small task, given the information coming from 100 officials and data from cameras following the vehicles, Whitaker said.
"We'll take an accounting of all the data this evening and weight the evidence," he said.
Even if a vehicle finishes all of the missions within six hours, it's conceivable that the team wouldn't win if the robot violates traffic rules.
"We're looking for the best system, not the fastest system," he said.
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