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DARPA Challenge Prize Money Restored

Posted by Zonk on Sun Dec 10, 2006 03:41 PM
from the yay-now-the-robots-can-buy-clothes dept.
Robotics Government The Almighty Buck Politics Science
antispam_ben wrote to mention that, some three months later, DARPA has been able to find the money to offer cash prizes once again. The DARPA Urban Challenge will go forward next November with more than $3 Million on the line. From the article: "The race will see as many as 90 teams 'drive' an unmanned robotic road vehicle through city traffic, competing to finish a 60-mile course within six hours. Set for November 3 of next year, the challenge will call on robots to safely obey traffic laws, negotiate busy intersections, merge into moving traffic, avoid obstacles and navigate traffic circles. DARPA has yet to disclose the race location, but has said it will be in the western United States. The government research group didn't unveil the 2005 Grand Challenge location in the Mojave Desert until weeks before that race, in order to avoid giving any team an advantage."
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[+] Science: No Cash Prize for Next DARPA Grand Challenge 107 comments
General Lee's Peking writes to mention an Associated Press article about a sad development in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Because of some new DoD-related legislation, the organization will no longer be able to award the $2 Million prize to grand challenge winners. It's not all bad, though; they still get a trophy. From the article: "The absence of a lucrative cash prize has forced some teams to retool their game plan and others to drop out. Some fear it would be harder to attract corporate sponsors and hurt media coverage of the race, which drew a throng of reporters last year and inspired a PBS documentary. 'The icing on the cake is gone,' said Ivar Schoenmeyr, team leader of California-based Team CyberRider, which is retrofitting a Toyota Prius hybrid."
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  • Just hit the cruise control, and go to sleep! It's a less expensive, and a whole lot more fun!

    • Re:No need for DARPA (Score:4, Insightful)

      by megaditto (982598) on Sunday December 10 2006, @08:29PM (#17188948)
      I know you are just kidding, but if you think about it, robotic driving is not rocket science, exactly.

      If you think about it, all the robotic drivers in computer games such as Grand Theft Auto are pretty damn good, and can follow rules and stick to routes much better than their human opponents. So, driving/navigation algorythms have been developed a decade ago, all they need is a good way to recognize their surroundings.

      With this in mind, this whole driving challenge is a problem no different from OCR or voice recognition.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by tulsaoc3guy (755854)
        When I was 18 and knew everything, I used to think everything was easy also.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ZeroExistenZ (721849)
        Coïncidently I've seen a documentary about the second challenge [torrentreactor.to].

        In the first challenge the teams, composed fo bright fellows, all failed exactly because it isn't so straightforward.
        The difficulty would exactly be adaptive decisionmaking of the robots; would DARPA (a military instance wanting automated vehicles) put in 2mio USD if it were as easy?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dslauson (914147)
        Video game driving algorithms rely on a discretized version of the world, meaning there is a finite set of possibilities for everything. There are far more possibilities in the real world, and a real-time system like this must take them all into account.

        You have a point that this does boil down to the problem of reducing a car's surroundings into meaningful data, much like in OCR or voice recognition, but there is VASTLY more data in the real world than there is in a single image or audio file.

        Humans have

  • Spooky (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Baricom (763970) on Sunday December 10 2006, @03:46PM (#17186904)
    I wonder who's going to be driving the other cars? In the previous races, the robots were traveling through a closed course with no traffic.

  • How much does the insurance cost for this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tinrobot (314936) on Sunday December 10 2006, @03:49PM (#17186926)
    I sure hope it's a closed course, because I'd hate to be t-boned by an errant robotic Touraeg.

  • Yeah! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10 2006, @03:57PM (#17186988)
    DARPA San Andreas baby!

    Actually, what I meant to say is that I'll be playing San Andreas in the automated vehicle while it safely navigates traffic--something I can no longer do after playing the GTA series. It is just too tempting to run down pedestrians and try to steal nicer and faster cars!

  • A city in the Western US... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ductonius (705942) on Sunday December 10 2006, @03:59PM (#17187006) Homepage
    ... road vehicle through city traffic, ... it will be in the western United States

    Will additional points be awarded if they successfully navigate the LA aqueducts, find Sarah Conner?

  • Traffic circles?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Qzukk (229616) on Sunday December 10 2006, @04:04PM (#17187044) Journal
    navigate traffic circles.

    No American is going to win this one...
    • For other brits out there, I've just googled "traffic circle" and I can confirm that the yanks haven't just made up another term for "roundabout".

      No, in this case they've also entirely buggered up the fundamental design too!
      http://www.alaskaroundabouts.com/mythfact1.html [alaskaroundabouts.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Charcharodon (611187)
      Yeah but the British team is going to go around to the left and end up getting in a head on with a HUMVEE

      For those of you unintiated to the wonders of British driving, anyone that tells you to get a right hand drive car to "help" you get into things more quickly should be punched in the throat. Drving on the left hand side of the road, in a right hand, manual car, traffic circles, and all the signs being unfarmiliar makes you feel like you are dislexic and sixteen again.

      The first week of driving in t

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Who got this stupid notion that the United States doesn't have traffic circles?

        Nobody said they didn't. But have you ever sat around watching Americans try to figure one out? (Actually new england apparently has enough that new england natives can figure it out as long as there aren't any foreigners screwing things up)

        • Who got this stupid notion that the United States doesn't have traffic circles?

          Nobody said they didn't. But have you ever sat around watching Americans try to figure one out? (Actually new england apparently has enough that new england natives can figure it out as long as there aren't any foreigners screwing things up)

          Only once in my whole entire life I have seen someone do something entirely stupid in a roundabout. You'd have to be an idiot to screw up it but the only time is when someone started backing

  • Yay congress. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yath (6378) on Sunday December 10 2006, @04:07PM (#17187070) Journal
    From the article:

    But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.

    No doubt the driving force behind this decision came from the folks at DARPA. First congress tells them to develop autonomous vehicles, then it proceeds to trip up their efforts with the "John Warner National Defense Authorization Act".

    What I'd really like to know is why they're pushing this technology so hard and fast. Does it make sense to go straight to an urban environment when only four constestants even managed to finish the last challenge?

    • Re:Yay congress. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ductonius (705942) on Sunday December 10 2006, @04:19PM (#17187144) Homepage
      Does it make sense to go straight to an urban environment when only four constestants even managed to finish the last challenge?

      They didn't need everyone from the last challenge to have finished it. They only need one.

      The fact that they got four finishers last time means the cross-country technology works. Now that removing the remaining bugs and improving cross-country technology is just a matter of time and money they can move onto the next step: urban driving.
        • No, you simply have no idea what you're talking about. The point of this is not to be so easy that 5 teams win the first time but to be challenging, with an assumption that likely no one will win the first time (or second, or third even, etc.). And yes, NYC is so much like driving through a fake city where the other drivers are all professionals with most likely very well reinforced cars. Hey, let's ban Nascar as well since it's probably 100 times as dangerous to human life as this ever will be.

  • Call me a cynic if you like... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by skelly33 (891182) on Sunday December 10 2006, @04:12PM (#17187106)
    but, while as a software engineer and electromechanical hobbyist I fully appreciate all the challenges involved with these robotic drivers, I'm just not impressed by systems that have courses plotted into them and use GPS and high resolution maps and intimate fore-knowledge of the landscape, etc. As a driver, -I- don't need that fore-knowledge to get from Sacramento to Manhattan - thousands of miles successfully navigated without any more fore-knowledge than that I have to travel generally North East through many states.

    I will be impressed when driving automation systems can start with a general idea of where their source and destination locations are and can read the signs to figure out how to get there. They must use perceptive powers to avoid colliding with other drivers or running down pedestrians and following the rules of the road instead of range finders and lasers and GPS-based speed limit adherance and other such nonsense.

    Until the system can be boiled down to a pair of eyes and a pwerful set of smarts driving , in my view, it's just an elaborate obstacle course being followed by the likes of this robot [robotroom.com]. I understand "baby steps", but "they" tend to avoid tackling these big challenges and instead continue to focus on these contraptions that just, plain aren't smart enough.

    IMHO, of course.
    • If I remember correctly, the last challenge had random things placed on the roads and in the paths of the vehicles, including ditches, and the vehicles managed to detect and work around those. Although I completely agree with you, I think it is indeed working towards those goals. Urban driving with lots of tunnels will probably help with reducing the dependency on GPS an it will be interesting to see the system evolve.
    • Read signs? Seriously if we are going to have robotic cars, I would only trust them on roads with radio transmitted signs. How hard is it to have signs in the road that say, which lane to get into, and what the speed limit is and whatnot. A fairly cheap implementation, and would allow you to have roads for robotic cars, and roads that only humans are allowed to drive on.
      • Yes, one of the few areas where I think RFID *should* be used. :) You could embed RFID tags in the asphalt where passing cars could get all kinds of data... lane information, speed limits, etc. Just an idea though. ;) It would sure make our job a lot easier! Our team has a lot of work to do before the race next November!
        • You're involved in this project and only replied to this one comment? Should I feel honored.

          Yea I looked at your profile hoping to see if you made other insightful comments to this article.
    • If you'd seen the talk at google [google.com] by last year's winner, you'd know that it's not as simple as you've made it. They're given GPS coordinates only shortly before the contest begins, in an effort to make sure nobody tries to precalculate the entire path etc (not sure what the input will be this time around). Not that it matters, as it would be hard to determine navigability with a simple 2d overhead satellite image. And they still need collision prediction & avoidance to avoid pedestrians and traffic (not

    • Re:Call me a cynic if you like... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Phleg (523632) <(gro.tesuot) (ta) (nehpets)> on Sunday December 10 2006, @05:27PM (#17187566) Homepage

      I've posted elsewhere in this story, but again to prefix my comments, I'm a member of the Georgia Tech team, Sting Racing [sting-racing.org].

      The course plotting part of the challenge is actually probably the easiest part. It's roughly analogous to you reading a map beforehand -- we're given a file detailing all the aspects of the course (course segments, how many lanes are in the segments, etc., and zones where free driving is allowed) plus a mission file giving the different waypoints we have to reach. This is, relatively speaking, easy.

      The difficult part is determining where the edges of the road and its lanes are (GPS is terrible at this; most of the time it's accurate to 10 or so feet unless you're using extraordinarily expensive differential units) which is mostly done using visual scanning. Of course, we also have to detect other vehicles or obstacles in the path (using LIDAR and vision) and also determine the correct "pose" of the vehicle. Then we have to take that information and use it to modify the path we've already decided to take. These problems as it turns out are far, far harder than just plotting courses.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Phleg (523632)

        And of course, a lot of the purpose of this challenge is exactly what you stated in your post: we have to detect and avoid other cars, use safe and proper driving etiquette for passing others, follow the rules of the road (i.e., four-way stops, etc.), and dynamically adapt our course to the conditions. Chiefly, this last requirement means noticing obstacles (construction, accidents, etc.) and rerouting, but this could also incorporate predicting traffic jams. For instance, if a heavily-traveled section of t

      • Of course, we also have to detect other vehicles or obstacles in the path (using LIDAR and vision) and also determine the correct "pose" of the vehicle.

        Looking at the pictures on your homepage you're using something like SICK scanning LIDAR units, right?

        I'm curious - what sort of data rate do you get out of those things?

        Thanks!

        • We are. I haven't worked on that part of the car, but from what I've heard the SICKs combined saturate a 1GB ethernet link. One of the big challenges we're going to have to overcome for the car is data storage. For testing purposes, we'd like to record the output from all the sensors for individual runs. That way software can be tested offline. But with those consuming 1Gbps, the video cameras consuming about 750Mbps each, and other sensors, even storing the data becomes a huge task. We're probably looking

        • The cars are going to have to be smart regardless. No matter what kinds of sensors are in the roads, there are going to be cars that aren't equipped with sensors, and have to be accounted for. Start including pedestrians, fallen trees, and any other unpredicted obstacles. Failures of the system would need to be recoverable too -- imagine what would happen if the sensors in the roads malfunctioned or went out. If all the cars were dependent on it, this would be a huge problem. But in a situation where the re

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by StikyPad (445176)
      I have to travel generally North East through many states.

      Hopefully less of the former and more of the latter, unless you're trying to travel through Canada to get there. NYC is only 2 degrees (~149mi) north of Sacramento. For comparison purposes, LA is 4 degrees (~312mi) south of Sac.

      So what you (and just about everyone else, myself included) REALLY need is a map and/or some signs, rather than some supposed "inherent sense of direction" that you seem to believe we possess. What you believe you know (tra
      • *Radar is the acronym for Radio Decetion and Ranging. I was thinking of the two attributes a nav radar system typically measures, which are range and direction.
    • This is why I preferred Stanley over Red team in the last race. The Red team sat down with high-res imagery and data, whereas the Stanley team just plotted in the GPS track. The Red team were even down to plotting their speed in meters/second around individual twists and turns. Stanley on the other hand had been taught to distinguish between safe road and unsafe road, and drive appropriately.
      The BBC made a great show about it [bbc.co.uk] which is well worth watching. Even if only for the onboard footage of Stanley cat

    • but, while as a software engineer and electromechanical hobbyist I fully appreciate all the challenges involved with these robotic drivers, I'm just not impressed [...] I will be impressed when driving automation systems can start with a general idea of where their source and destination locations are and can read the signs to figure out how to get there.

      So, you will be impressed by next year's challlenge winners, then?

      Personally I'll be impressed when I see production cars with a built-in survival instincts (sensors reacting to dangerous situations, preventing collisions despite human error, incompetance, drunkeness, etc.).

    • I'm just not impressed by systems that have courses plotted into them and use GPS and high resolution maps and intimate fore-knowledge of the landscape, etc.

      The fact that no cars finished the first year, and only three the second, prove that the challenge difficulty was perfect - difficult but achievable by taking the few next technological steps. Whether it impresses you is more a measure of your preconceptions of the field than of the field itself. If you're so sure it's easy, I encourage you to step

      • Autonomous lane following by itself isn't actually even all that impressive. If I recall, there was a German who in the 80s set up a car to drive itself along the highway, with only minimal human intervention. It's interacting with other cars and navigating complex (i.e., non-highway) lanes.
  • This cannot be allowed to happen! Tell those DARPA spooks to take their ROTM challenge elsewhere! Or at least just flat out say it'll take place in LA and if mad robots happen to knock down every building in town, so much the better. I for one will avoid any city on that date.

  • Robust policy needed (Score:3, Funny)

    by Baldrson (78598) * on Sunday December 10 2006, @04:45PM (#17187292) Homepage Journal
    DARPA presumably lost its granting authority with the passage of a congressional act--the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007--which gave money-granting power to another government agency, Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. So at the time, instead of awarding $2 million for first prize, $500,000 for second and $250,000 for third, DARPA said it would simply give out trophies to the three finalists.

    But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.

    Policy that is so prone to failure is about as ridiculous as a system that cuts off funding to an entire branch of the military if someone tweaks some minor policy somewhere.

    These prize awards aren't just some minor toy program -- they are the future of technology development which means defense preparedness. Maybe there are some radical Muslim cleric moles posing as policy makers. Oh well... Islam isn't as bad as some theocracies.

  • Does the robot vehicle hit and run or stay?
    Does it recognize a human laying in the road?
  • The race will see as many as 90 teams 'drive' an unmanned robotic road vehicle

    I know... I know... they did put 'drive' in semi-quotes, but it's still misleading to a reader who is unfamiliar with the Challenge.

    I've said it before and I'll say it again: The robots will be driving themselves.

    This type of design is worlds different from a system to be 'driven' using a joystick or by some guy monitoring the robot's progress. Amazing leaps and bounds in artificial intelligence, software image recogniti
  • If I were a contestant, I would make sure my vehicle stays out of the way of Oshkosh Truck's entry! http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/Track_A_ Teams/TeamOshkoshTruck.asp [darpa.mil]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Phleg (523632)
      The maximum speed any car will be allowed to do on the course is 35mph (might be 30mph, it's been awhile since I looked). There will be blocked streets so cars will have to replan their route, and we can probably assume DARPA is going to throw a traffic jam at us.

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