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Inside DARPA's Robot Race
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Mar 29, 2006 01:26 PM
from the ghost-cars dept.
from the ghost-cars dept.
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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Used to be a lot slower. (Score:3, Interesting)
But mostly these robots depend on the assumption that everything remains still.
Seen it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seen it (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Seen it-One eyed. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is actually not too far different from how human vision wo
Re:Fascinating program (Score:5, Informative)
One paper that's of interest might be here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/thrun/p
And that paper is mentioned in the readme of the BFL (Bayesian Filtering Library) found here:
http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~kgadeyne/software
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.
BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.
Parent
Re:Fascinating program (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Stanford 0wn3d Carnegie (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Stanford 0wn3d Carnegie (Score:3, Insightful)
Great show but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Great show but... (Score:3, Informative)
Mostly paid employees and purchased parts (Score:3, Informative)
The big breakthrough was Stanford's texture vision system. I was very impressed
Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
MOD PARENT UP- this is DAMN relevant (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night. (Score:5, Interesting)
I will say, I was impressed, and surprised that I did not see an article on it at
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.
Re:I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night. (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess; in the end it was a close shave and the tortoise only won by a whisker? ;)
Parent
Re:I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night. (Score:3, Insightful)
torrent (Score:5, Informative)
Agressive Robot Drivers (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Tell PBS Thanks! (Score:4, Informative)
Let PBS know [pbs.org] what you thought about the format, show, or anything else.
-Ian
but would it work? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Robot Wars (Score:3, Funny)
Details in the program (Score:3, Insightful)
-- 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.
Re:You almost never see the words (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Sensors (Score:3, Informative)