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Inside DARPA's Robot Race

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Mar 29, 2006 12:26 PM
from the ghost-cars dept.
Robotics Science
Belfegor writes "The PBS series Nova has a great feature on their website, regarding the coverage of the DARPA-sponsored 'Robot Race' in which driverless vehicles 'competed' in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. The full show is available on the website, and besides that they have plenty more information about the robotics behind the challenge, and also some pretty cool out-takes from the show."
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[+] The European Grand Challenge 61 comments
An anonymous reader writes "A European version of the DARPA Grand Challenge is being held in Germany next month. Instead of a race through the desert, the EU challenge is split into three events. Urban, non-urban, and landmine detection will be the 'courses', with multiple winners in each event. Interestingly Sebastian Thrun, winner of last year's Challenge, has been forbidden from taking part despite being a European citizen." From the article: "The trials will take place in and around Hammelburg, a mockup of a town used by the German military for training exercises. In the non-urban course the robots will have to contend with a one-kilometer route containing ditches, barbed wire fences, cattle guards, fires, narrow underpasses, and inclines of up to 40 degrees. The urban and landmine 500-meter trials will require the robots to negotiate doorways, stairs, partially collapsed buildings, and poor visibility from smoke or partial lighting. Along the way, they will also have to search for designated objects and report their findings back to base."
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Inside DARPA's Robot Race 50 Comments More /

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  • Used to be a lot slower. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rob_squared (821479) <rob.squaredNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:31PM (#15018921)
    I remember an old nova special about self-navigating robots, and at first it took about a day to cross a room.

    But mostly these robots depend on the assumption that everything remains still.

  • Seen it (Score:5, Informative)

    by Moby Cock (771358) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:31PM (#15018926) Homepage
    PBS broadcast that show last night. While I realise that is is a little 2001 to actually watch a program when it is braodcast, I did. And I really enjoyed it. I am hardly current on the status of autonomous robotics and I was pleasantly surprised by how far along the technology is. 130 miles through the dessert using only GPS and local sensors is a pretty amazing feat, and that course was tough. It features mountain switchbacks, tunnels and other hazards. If you even have a passing interest in robotics I recommend watching the show.

    • Seen it-One eyed. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The interesting thing for me is that the method we use (our eyes) was too difficult for machines. That's why all those robots used lasers, and other techniques. We've come far, but we still have a long way to go.

    • This was a fascinating program. It would have been nice if the Stanford team divulged more of their ideas, what software languages and designs they used etc. It looked like they were doing a Bayesian classification on combined laser ranging and video on the terrain ahead. Doing that for 1 image is complicated enough. Doing 10+/sec is mindblowing. The control system moderated the vehicle's need to follow a prescribed path with how safe the path was. Amazing stuff, very elegant. Pretty much done with a stock

      • I agree that more detail would have been preferable. However, I expect the producers have to contend with trying to make this show appeal to a broader viewership than the typical /. geeks like you or I.

        Does anyone have any links that contain more gory details about the Stanford effort?

        • Re:Fascinating program (Score:5, Informative)

          by SpyPlane (733043) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @02:13PM (#15019779)
          Do a google search on Sabastian Thrun, he was the team lead for Stanford, and formally at CMU (what a non-coincidence). Most of the software they used on Stanly (Stanford's bot) was either written by Sebastian in his former research or taken from experience gained on CMU's team the previous year. The ladar mapping he used, I know I saw on some former page of his that had all the gory algorithm details. It might just take a little bit of searching. He also has a c library out there somewhere that does a lot of this stuff, but I can't seem to find it now.

          One paper that's of interest might be here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/thrun/pu blic_html/papers/thrun.ces-tr.html [cmu.edu] (sorry, no linky, writing in a hurry)

          And that paper is mentioned in the readme of the BFL (Bayesian Filtering Library) found here:
          http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~kgadeyne/software/ bfl-trunk/ [kuleuven.be]

          Lastly, at one point all of us competitors were required to give our design documents to DARPA, and they put them up on their webpage here:
          http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge05/techpapers.h tml [darpa.mil]

          BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.
              • > Now once at Stanford they changed how they did things entirely and wrote a ton of code to make everything play much nicer than CMU's platform.

                This sounds a little bit more like that, what I have heard. I've read, that they throw away most of the code and rewrote a large deal. E.g the classification of driveable terrain by the laser scanner was rewritten and learned. AFAIK, most of what has been published (and to what you pointed) is fairly generic stuff.

                To the best of my knowledge [ira.uka.de], it has not been pu
    • It was a good show. One nifty bit of engineering from the Stanford team was to overlay a video camera image over laser-generated map, use a color-matching system to determine what colors of the video were level and safe to drive on, and then extrapolate what areas of the video image were safe.

      The main difficulty that I see, going forward, is that the laser-rangefinder systems that these robots all relied on all function by looking for obstacles and attempting to avoid them. They can spot vertical anomalie
    • I agree. It was a very good program, made even better by the fact that it's narrated by John Lithgow. (I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet.)

    • Re:Seen it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vistic (556838)
      I caught the show yesterday also.

      I was really happy Stanford won the competition. The "red" team with two entries (from Carnegie Mellon?) also finished but were behind on time... the thing is though not only was Stanford's win absolute, they also did it much "smarter".

      Stanford took an approach of focusing on software, to make their vehicle more smart. They gave it the course, but left it up to the vehicle to decide how fast to go and the specifics of how soon to turn, etc.

      Meanwhile Carnegie Mellon took th

  • Stanford 0wn3d Carnegie (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Unlike Carnegie's "H1ghlander" and "Sandstorm", Stanford's "Stanley" VW Touareg had no fancy motion compensated sensors and the team didn't flesh out the race course with more GPS data and tell the vehicle how fast it could drive in certain areas. Stanley's software did all that on the fly.

    Also, the SuperDAD Toyota pickup looked like it had a tenth of the tech of Stanley but it was doing almost as well. If only the laser sensor hadn't detached itself from the roof.
    • True. There was so much hype surroung "Red Storm" and how it would p0wn the rest of the field before GC-1. Then during the trials, their Hummer tipped over because it took a curve too fast (d'oh!! where's the linkage between the wheel turning system and the speed system?). And in the race, it almost caught fire because 1 wheel got stuck and the other spun freely; the system controlling the engine just kept increasing the RPM, with the eventual result that the tires melted and flew off, and the controllers h

  • Great show but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SeeMyNuts! (955740) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:35PM (#15018953)

    it is interesting just how involved the contestants are. This contest is their life. They mentioned several times in the show how many months of long workdays they spent to build and program these cars. And, then, who owns the work? Do they at least get patent recognition on some of the innovations? Some of the software they talked about was truly seriously cool stuff.

    Sidenote: One hour of Nova or Frontline is like watching 5 days worth of "learning" and "discovery" shows elsewhere. It's amazing how good some of these shows are.

    • I love PBS documentaries man. You can learn sooo much from them in a nice little narrated package.

      Maybe all these guys are geniuses and get grants to work on the stuff. Maybe university supported or something like that. Or! They make their money in half a year, and build robot cars the rest of the time.
          • Most (or many) universities make you sign away your rights to a patent for something you created on "university" time with university funds and equipment. It's one of the many political battlegrounds on campus in higher education these days. "How do you define what was done on whose time?" "Just because I work for the university doesn't mean that everything I do belongs to the uni", etc. etc.

            I would wager that Stanford would be on the high ground if it came down to a legal battle.
    • They'll get patent recognition if they, you know, filed any patents. These teams can do whatever they want with any innovations they make. Many of them, especially the school based teams, operate under grants from other agencies which might have limitations on who owns or can patent what. However, each team makes the choice about where their funding comes from and what strings are attached to it.
    • Most of the successful teams had significant numbers of paid employees. Stanford had about sixty people back at Volkswagen working on the hardware. CMU had a huge headcount; they had more than fifty people on site at the Speedway, including people on the payrolls of Lockheed, Caterpillar, and other vendors. Oshkosh Truck was all paid employees. Didn't talk to the Grey Team much, but they were paid by some Insurance company.

      The big breakthrough was Stanford's texture vision system. I was very impressed

  • Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ackthpt (218170) * on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:35PM (#15018957) Homepage Journal
    After watching Why We Fight [imdb.com], I'm not so keen on something like this anymore.
    • As a student at Carnegie Mellon who has discovered the extent of his school's ties to development (had I known prior... and no, CMU is not unique in this regard, the problem is everywhere) of military products and has since spoken out against them a few times, thank you for realizing that this DARPA stuff isn't all it's cracked up to be.

      I'm perhaps one of four people (an exaggeration, I hope) on my campus that isn't gung-ho about helping the DOD build driverless vehicles, and it's lonely at times.

      Whatever m
  • As an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, it was great to see the coverage. I did not realize that a lot of the Stanford team came from CMU; certainly says a lot about our robotics dept. Red is certainly a powerhouse there, and congrats that the two vehicles came in second and third.

    I'm such a Nova junkie, and this was an excellent episode.

  • I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hackstraw (262471) * on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:37PM (#15018980) Homepage

    I will say, I was impressed, and surprised that I did not see an article on it at /.. I believe there was one last year.

    I will say, that aside from "Stanley" winning the race on completion and time, I also believe that Stanley was the best technology. The H1lander and friend were micromanaged, and there were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair) and it took almost the whole 2 hours of a team of people to map out the course and program the robots. They then added the fudge factor for human error with the fast and slow strategies.

    Stanley was programmed in minutes of receiving the map, and it calculated its speed dynamically on its own. Stanley had "adaptive vision" which overlaid laser, video, and other sensory data to create a dynamic field of view of what was safe to drive through.

    Now, what shocked me, was that so many teams finished this year. Nobody got past 7 or 9 miles last year, and many vehicles passed the entire 132 mile trip this year. Watching the vehicles drive was impressive. Most of the time, they appeared to be manned.

    The course was not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. With the success of Stanley, I believe that this will increase the adaptive and learning capabilities in current software controlled systems. Currently, software is brute forced into trying to accommodate all possible logical conditions, which is impossible, and often just wrong.

    • There were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair)

      Let me guess; in the end it was a close shave and the tortoise only won by a whisker? ;)

    • The Red team (CMU) basically preprogrammed their robots before the race by looking at satellite maps of the race course. I thought in essence this was cheating but I suppose it was not against the rules. The Blue Team (Stanford) had a better software solution where their robot would essentialy drive and learn on the fly. I'm glad to see Stanley won because this is the technology needed for automated driving, imagine using the Red team's solution and have to preprogram you car? What's the point?
      • I'm glad to see Stanley won because this is the technology needed for automated driving, imagine using the Red team's solution and have to preprogram you car? What's the point?

        Exactly. I believe that the Stanley approach was more "real life" for what we do now, and what will be done in the future. When I go on a trip, or even go to somewhere locally where I don't know the exact location of where I go, I at least get the address and correlate it to something I do know. With the ease and availability of Go
  • 'Coverage' and 'Darpa' in the same paragraph.

    Another interesting point is that it seems to me that this is the development arena for the military's new autonomously roving gun platform.

    • Re:You almost never see the words (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jett (135113) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:54PM (#15019121) Homepage
      I hadn't heard about it being for an autonomous gun platform. I watched the show last night and they presented it as purely for supply transports. They specifically mentioned Jessica Lynch and how she was just a truck driver who should never of been exposed to combat. They also mentioned that the DOD want's 1/3rd of their transport trucks to be autonomous within 10 years.

      • What struck me about that comment regarding Jessica Lynch is that she was resupplying the frontline. That means she was driving an armoured truck to where guys (and girls) are actively engaged in firefights but her exposure to danger was the concern. Of course, anyway that we can have fewer people in harm's way in a positive but I found it unsettling that the battle line soldiers were mentioned as a throw-away in order to frame their argument.

        Overall though, a good show. Go watch it.

  • torrent (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29 2006, @12:43PM (#15019036)
    http://www.mininova.org/tor/266446 [mininova.org]

  • My Robot (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I would have entered a giant mechanical penis shaped robot car with "Kill all humans" written on the sides.

    Too bad I've been so busy slacking this year.

  • Agressive Robot Drivers (Score:5, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) * on Wednesday March 29 2006, @01:09PM (#15019248)
    What do you do in the future when one of these is mass-produced and forgets its turn signal and cuts you off?
    Do you scream and give it the finger?
    Throw rocks at it?
    Run it off the road?
    Launch a homing missile at it?
    Any way around it, driverless vehicles will have no rights in our future society!
    Who will speak up for the robots?

    • What do you do in the future when one of these is mass-produced and forgets its turn signal and cuts you off?
      ...
      driverless vehicles will have no rights in our future society!

      If your fears are realized, hopefully they'll have no lefts either.

  • Tell PBS Thanks! (Score:4, Informative)

    by IanDanforth (753892) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @01:13PM (#15019279)
    I really enjoyed this, especially the fact that it was the full show online for free.

    Let PBS know [pbs.org] what you thought about the format, show, or anything else.

    -Ian

  • A lot of things seems trivial to implement in theory, but in actuality physical and environmental constraints seem to introduce a whole different ball game. A big congrats to all the teams who entered.

    One thing that I noticed from the article is that one of the teams has problems with dust accumulating on the sensors. How would one get rid of this dust, so that you don't recieve incorrect readings?

        • Honestly, not really. It was so damn dry out there that they water would spray the dust off and dry off in no time. I'd say rarely though did we ever see the water system turn on. Really, only in our mud testing did we ever get major buildup. Those LADAR's were pretty resilient sensors. The sun shining in them was much worse than any dust buildup.

  • Interview with Director and Team Leader (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Last Saturday, Digital Village Radio [digitalvillage.org] did an interview with Jason Spingarn-Koff, the filmaker of The Great Robot Race, and Sebastian Thrun, the leader of the winning Team Stanford. Here's a link to the mp3 [digitalvillage.org].

  • but would it work? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lardlad (959872) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @01:25PM (#15019370)
    So DARPA funds this to create autonomous supply vehicles, which might work in a traditional battle with clearly drawn front lines and relatively secure transport routes behind the lines.

    It seems to me like 21st century warfare is a whole different animal - how hard would it be for a motivated, talented individual to figure out some simple attacks for the navigation systems on these vehicles, and get loads of sweet US munitions delivered to their doorstep? How effective would one of these vehicles be in an urban setting? How easy would it be to create a series of obstacles that would paralyze one of these vehicles?

    It's amazing technology, for sure, and the Stanford and CMU teams deserve kudos. I'm just concerned that with the current rush to technological solutions and shift away from "boots on the ground", this technology will be in battle zones far too quickly.

  • Sebastien Thrun's book (Score:3, Informative)

    by jdduke (733610) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @01:27PM (#15019387)
    If anyone is really interested in the technical and mathematical side of this stuff, I definitely recommend Probabilistic Robotics [amazon.co.uk] by (among others) Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and leader of the winning team in this race.
  • Something that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!

    Seriously though, I'd been hoping someone would be putting together something like this (though I'd been expecting it form Discovery or TLC - yay for public television). Fortunately, it is available online [pbs.org] for those of us who missed it.
  • Obligatory Simpsons Quote:
    "The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
    -- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of
          Lisa Simpson"
  • This was a very good NOVA documentary. It moved quickly and covered a lot of new ground in a short time, like the algorithms the robots used and the kinds of problems they solved, unlike most documentaries which repackage the same science anecdotes over and over or only discuss philosophy.

    It wasn't as much the fact that Stanley won the race as how Stanley won the race and the differing approaches of the builders that made it interesting.

    Unfortunately, it was not in HD. It was widescreen low definition. T

  • Robot Wars (Score:3, Funny)

    by s31523 (926314) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @02:12PM (#15019771)
    At what point do the robots turn on each other and try to smash one another with saws, hammers and spikes? Wait, I think that is a different show...
  • I watched this show when it aired last night. I'd actually been looking forward to it quite a bit since seeing a preview for it a week or so ago. Is it just me, or is Nova possibly the best show on television? I don't get so interested in every subject they cover, so I don't watch it all the time, but, I must say, every episode I have seen has been excellent. We could use more television like this, and a lot less American Idol and other BS.

    There was nothing quite like seeing, for the first time in my life,

  • Details in the program (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gcanyon (458998) on Wednesday March 29 2006, @02:36PM (#15019993)
    There were several points made in the program that I hadn't heard elsewhere (and I've been paying attention to the Grand Challenge since the initial press release).

      -- The teams get the GPS waypoints a few hours before the race. The waypoints are purposefully vague, so the robots have the choice of driving off a cliff (or into one) while still being within GPS parameters. This is supposed to prevent the race from reducing to "Who can follow GPS the best?" The Red Team had a group of what looked like 20 or 30 people who immediately sat down with the waypoints mapped out on satellite imagery, going through and adding waypoints of their own and adding speed commands for their robots. This seems to me to be a big violation of the spirit of the competition.
      -- The Red Team had two entries, which they programmed differently: one more aggressive, the other more conservative (on speed). The faster robot, Highlander, was pulling away from Stanley for the first part of the race, until some unknown issue starting causing problems. Nova didn't say what was wrong, but it looked literally like Highlander was slipping out of gear and rolling back down hills. It _might_ have been doing it on purpose, i.e. a software glitch, but it didn't look that way.
      -- One of the Red Team's entries completed the last portion (the hardest portion) of the course with its main sensor non-functional -- it was stuck pointed 90 degrees to the side. This argues even more strongly that the Red Team's vehicles weren't doing much route-finding and were pretty much just following GPS waypoints.

    The conclusion I draw from this is that we are still a long way from the DOD's goal of autonomous transport vehicles. In a combat situation, transports need to be able to avoid obstacles put in their way _by the enemy_. The only time during this challenge that the vehicles did anything like this was during the initial trials before the race, and that was very limited. The actual race course was hard -- off-road, dirt, narrow, slippery -- but it didn't have tank traps painted the same color as the dirt they rest on. It didn't have razor-wire barricades, forcing the cars to figure out a route through the bushes around them.

    I'm confident that if I had been on the course fifteen minutes before the cars showed up, I could have stalled or disabled all of them. Pile a bunch of bushes across the road and all of them would have stopped. During the trials and race, none of them demonstrated the ability to work around such a very limited obstacle.

    All of this is not to minimize what was accomplished. But we're a long way from sitting back sipping champagne while robots do the dirty work of war.
    • What would a fully functional independent robot do? How would it improve your lifestyle? What is that worth to you, as a consumer? When you can make a valid business case based on good answers to those questions, the robots will come out of the woodwork.

      In some arenas, the technology already exists. Roomba vacuums are fully functional independent robots. You can get (for a price, and with limited capability) robot lawn mowers. Some subway systems use automated trains; they're fully functional and independe

    • What are we starting?
      Don't you see? This is the beginnings of a grand scheme to unite all of mankind by creating a common enemy which will attempt to destroy us all. East and West, Communist and Capitalist, Arab and Israeli, Muslim and Christian -- all will have to unite against the evil that will be machines. And after the dust settles, we'll all live happily together. Or something.

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