Rocket City Rock Crawlers Homepage
Forum Home Forum Home > General > General 4x4 Discussion
  New Posts New Posts RSS Feed - Robot Race Suffers Quick, Ignoble End
  FAQ FAQ  Forum Search   Events   Register Register  Login Login

Robot Race Suffers Quick, Ignoble End

 Post Reply Post Reply
Author
Message
alabamatoy View Drop Down
Admin Group
Admin Group
Avatar
I dont work here anymore...

Joined: 16 February 2004
Location: Signal Mountain
Status: Offline
Points: 9364
Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote alabamatoy Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Robot Race Suffers Quick, Ignoble End
    Posted: 15 March 2004 at 6:08am

Robots are a big deal around my office, and in some co-workers were at this event.

San Francisco Chronicle
March 14, 2004
Pg. 1

Robot Race Suffers Quick, Ignoble End

By Tom Abate, Chronicle Staff Writer

Primm, Nev. -- A robot race across the Mojave Desert turned into a parade of frustration Saturday, as 15 driverless vehicles spun their wheels, flipped over and encountered rocks and ruts that befuddled sensors and baffled programming.

The 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.

David Hall, a Morgan Hill businessman whose robotic pickup truck, Team DAD, placed third by going six miles before getting stuck, said he thinks the driverless auto of today is where the chess-playing computer was a decade ago.

[Note from doc: my coworker talked to these guys.  She said they told her the genesis of this whole project for them was they wanted a way to be able to go out and get drunk and have someone drive them home - a robotic "designated driver".  They were the only ones who drove their robotic vehicle to the contest, where they discovered that DARPA would not let them take it back to the motel after the "tech inspection". They had to hitch a ride back to town and rent a car to get back to the motel while DARPA kept their pickup truck under observation.  TOO funny....]

"How you drive a car is all programmable,'' Hall said. "It's not a creative process. You don't have time to think. Driving is a well-defined set of rules you learn. That, we can program.''

But Saturday it was clear the programming has a ways to go.

The race began optimistically enough, when the "smart" red Hummer entered by a team of robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University surged forward at 6:30 a.m. to the cheers of several hundred onlookers who braved the early morning chill at the starting line.

Hours earlier, each of the 15 robots had uploaded a set of several thousand GPS coordinates that marked out the course to Primm, on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Although several entries successfully started the course, apprehension rippled through the crowd at Barstow when rumors spread around 9 a.m. that CMU's Hummer, the race's odds-on favorite, had developed engine trouble and possibly caught fire.

"Of all the things to go wrong,'' moaned San Francisco-born Caitlin Lovett, 21, a junior at CMU who worked on the robot that reportedly cost $3 million to build.

Though the engine rumor proved wrong, DARPA officials said a front tire on the vehicle did catch fire when the Hummer's left wheels went off the side of a road 7.4 miles into the course and spun helplessly over a cliff until nearby safety monitors pulled the robot's plug and extinguished the flames. The CMU Hummer went the farthest of any of the entrants.

Each robotic vehicle was trailed by DARPA officials armed with wireless controls capable of disabling any robot that drifted off course or posed a danger to human or animal life. The course traversed habitat frequented by the endangered desert tortoise, and DARPA took the precaution of sending teams of biologists out ahead of the race to make sure none of the slow-moving creatures got in the way.

Bruce Hall, who helped his brother, Dave, create Team DAD, said DARPA officials told them their vehicle's front tires got stuck on rocks 6 miles into the race, in a portion of the course where they'd slowed the robot down to a 5 mph crawl.

Hall said the monitors watched Team DAD kick up dust for a couple of hours before pronouncing it stuck and hitting the stop button. Then, Hall said,they flipped the switch that returned Team DAD to human control, gunned the accelerator once, and the truck hopped back onto the track.

"All it needed was a little gas,'' said Hall who, together with his brother, poured $40,000 and umpteen hours of work into the effort.

The driverless dirt bike designed by UC Berkeley graduate student Anthony Levandowski, 23, had become the darling of this impromptu robot community, but yesterday it suffered two setbacks that doomed it to embarrassment.

When Levandowski arrived at the Barstow starting point a few hours before dawn, he discovered that the $50 electric motor he'd rigged to crank the handlebar clutch had burned out, and he didn't have a spare.

So he withdrew his Ghostrider Robot from the official competition, and instead offered to launch the two-wheeler via a wire-guided remote control -- only to forget to make sure the system he designed to stabilize the two-wheeler was turned on prior to launch.

"It's such a stupid mistake after a year and a half of hard engineering,'' said Levandowski, who put roughly $100,000 of his own money into the project. Undeterred, he said he'd be back next year "on two wheels, and with a check list.''

While Saturday's results may make the race seem like a lark, Col. Jose Negron, the DARPA official who cooked up the idea, reminded reporters at a predawn briefing that the Pentagon is serious about making one-third of all military transport vehicles driverless by 2015.

"The desert environment is where the future battlefields of the U.S. will be,'' Negron said, adding that DARPA would try again to "harvest technology'' from gifted amateurs like Saturday's competitors.

Tether said that technically the participating inventors "are under no obligation" to share their most important ideas, the computer algorithms they wrote to drive their robots.

"We'll try to induce them by making small grants," the DARPA director said.

"If you didnt buy your 1st gen 4Runner new, then YOU are a newbie!!"

BRC Life Member
Back to Top
 Post Reply Post Reply
  Share Topic   

Forum Jump Forum Permissions View Drop Down

Forum Software by Web Wiz Forums® version 12.01
Copyright ©2001-2018 Web Wiz Ltd.

This page was generated in 0.063 seconds.