Carnegie Mellon Wins Urban Challenge

ThinkingInBinary writes "The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order."

MIT?

MIT, MIT...

Oh yeah, isn't that kind of like Massachusetts' version of CMU?

The importance of this race cannot be overstated

While the immediate winners of the race are the three teams holding checks, as well as the military which gets to pick from a field of highly successful new technology, the real beneficiaries will be the drivers of the world. I believe the importance of this hasn't quite filtered into most people's minds.

Many people know that more than 40,000 people die each year in motor vehicle accidents, however when it comes to people I feel this number is insufficient. "More than 40,000 people" have been dying each year now for more than a decade, and that's only in the US. Since I was 17 more than four hundred thousand people have died participating in an activity that machines can now do flawlessly (if very slowly). This blows my mind.

Worldwide, 1.2 million people die on the roads every year and the repercussions of these deaths on families and friends can be unusually devastating due to their sudden, unexpected nature.

The performance of these three teams is akin to three major pharmaceuticals all announcing they have come up with a cure for one of the major cancers. That, surely, would have been worldwide front-page news.

Now, of course, the real debate begins. How much more will consumers be willing to pay for safe vehicles, and what limitations on speed will they accept? Rolling out this technology (if you'll excuse the play on words) will require changes in infrastructure, law, and cultural mentality. Especially here in the states. If it means saving this many lives, will you pay twice as much and drive at half speed, at least for a little while?

Insufficient deaths

Many people know that more than 40,000 people die each year in motor vehicle accidents, however when it comes to people I feel this number is insufficient.

I feel that way myself sometimes.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

Now, of course, the real debate begins. How much more will consumers be willing to pay for safe vehicles, and what limitations on speed will they accept? Rolling out this technology (if you'll excuse the play on words) will require changes in infrastructure, law, and cultural mentality. Especially here in the states. If it means saving this many lives, will you pay twice as much and drive at half speed, at least for a little while?

Even more so, how much would people be willing to not drive at all?

It's kind of interesting how much effort has gone in to building a robot that can drive in (error-prone) human traffic. If, on the other hand, *every* car was automated, it would be so much easier to implement. (Controls built into the road, maybe, and of course less need to handle wildly out-of-control cars; plus benefits like optimized freeways (anyone remember "Blue Thunder"'s freeway?) and intelligent intersections that talk to incoming cars, etc.) I think the eventual progression is to automated and efficient public transportation, where no one owns their own car, nor needs to. Did anybody consider, back in the day, if one car per person/family was actually a good idea?

Re:

If, on the other hand, *every* car was automated, it would be so much easier to implement.

also, if every car was automated and the controls were built into the road, there would be a massive single point of failure.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

Transition is the key issue. If we were to redesign the transportation system again given the current state of knowledge and technology, it would probably be vastly different than the system that is currently in place. However, there already is a system in place which is crucial for every aspect of our lives. So a feasible transition plan will have to be central in any new technology.

Re:

Driving is a privilage, not a right.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

Oh, let's see - maybe the fact that I have to share the roads with dangerous drivers?

We limit the rights of some to protect the rights of all - if you are an unsafe driver, I will happily limit your right to drive if it increases the rights of the majority to drive safely.

That, my snide friend, is what gives me the right - the same right that pretty much all of the laws of the US are based on. Also the same reason you have to take a driving test and maintain a driver's license. Yes, that's right, a license to drive. Pretty "Soviet", eh? In your view, is it only American if we just let everyone jump behind the wheel, even the blind and insane, because "America, Fuck Yeah!"?

I'm sorry, but think before you post. It enriches us all.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

What gives you the right to decide who can and can't have a car?

I don't know who you're responding to, since nobody suggested forcibly taking away cars. But I do find it very interesting how people respond to deaths from various sources. 40K per year is a pretty staggering number. Terrorism, for instance, is insignificant in comparison. Even the number of Americans killed in World War II is only 1 decade of auto deaths!

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

I thought true freedom came only when you had nothing to tie you down?

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

In fact, there's a whole school of thought that suggests that freedom is not possible without property. Somehow, this is counter-intuitive to some.

I think freedom is good, and property is good. However, the two are not synonymous, in fact they're in opposition! Ownership is the legal right to restrict the actions of others (namely the freedom to walk off with things). Again, not that ownership is a bad idea, I just think it's funny how people who think they hate government actually love certain legal contrivances, such as ownership, and call anything they like "freedom" even when referring to restrictive laws which they support.

Open source ...if only.

How far this technology has come in just a few years is (ridiculously) amazing. Major kudos to everyone who's brought this so far!

I only wish that one of the conditions of winning was to release the software that powered your car - can you imagine how much farther things would have come if everyone could build on the previous years' winners? So much brilliant coding has gone into this, but so much of it is just reinventing the wheel. (...Ouch.) But in all honesty, the state of the art would progress gigantically if one of the winners would GPL their car-driving software.

Re:Open source ...if only.

The most important thing is that the algorithms are written up and published in peer-reviewed journals. That understanding is more important than the code itself. My RoboCup robootic soccer team published all of its source code one year, and not much came of it; Some people used it but they didn't really understand it. It's also hard to take the code and make it work with a different robot, as all the customized hardware on the robot means a lot of porting, and uncovering bugs and design limitations. Also, competition code often has its design stretched to the limit by the time the competition arrives, and if you redid it you might design it differently to make it cleaner. So, our papers have probably helped many more people than our code ever did. I did release a library along with some papers explaining it, and that worked well. But that's just a small part of the overall codebase.

Of course, it would be nice to see the code out there, but the science is more important than the implementation. However, if we were talking about an off-the-shelf robot such as a roomba or aibo, the situation is quite different.

Editorial discretion

Nothing at all in that summary tells me what the Urban Challenge is; nothing in ANY of the links tells me concisely what it is, either; Wiki [wikipedia.org] eventually did. How hard would it be to include "a prize competition for driverless cars" in the first sentence of that article?

Are y'all experimenting with automated posting or something, because that at least would make sense.

Triv

This spells doom for ...

... suicide car bombers.

MIT pimp ride

I almost laughed out loud when I saw pictures of MIT's pimped out Land Rover. Besides the numerous external sensors and other gear mounted on the vehicle, I read that there is so much internal equipment to manage everything that they had real heating issues that were solved by installing an additional air conditioner and a power generator to power the AC. This is what happens when you give some money and parts to a bunch of bright geeks with too much time.

obligatory

2nd is the best

Re:

I doubt that any of these teams will have turned a profit on this competition - do you have any idea how much it costs to field an entry, including staff, equipment, materials, entry fees etc?

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

I doubt that any of these teams will have turned a profit on this competition

Did you miss the red bull,GM, google, caterpillar, VW, Bosch, paint job?

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

Did you miss all the expensive equipment mounted on the car? Have you ever entered an engineering competition? Almost all teams take commercial sponsors, annd rarely do teams make a profit - after all, you only solicit as many sponsors as it takes to get the project built.

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

I doubt that any of these teams will have turned a profit on this competition

But I'm sure they'll have turned out a good number of masters, phds and scientific papers.

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

All three teams took development money from DARPA. As such, DARPA gets a copy of all software and development notes that the teams produced.

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

if it was open source, the car would first ask you to load kld_brake_for_kids. After struggling with that for a few days you'd get on the road only to find you crash into a tree because the cars hardware isn't compatible, and some guy on /. would tell you it's ok because you have the source and can write your own do not crash into tree's module.

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

No, no open source code. But what the public does get out of this is advances in technology. Case in point: the *real* winners of this year's Urban Challenge are Velodyne [velodyne.com]. Their lidar sensor was invented by team DAD for the 2005 challenge. For the 2007 challenge, they decided that instead of losing the competition again, they would sell their lidar technology to the other teams. Over half of the 35 teams in the challenge bought one, and 5 of the 6 finishers (Virginia Tech being the exception).

This thing is a huge advance over previous technology for this application, and it directly owes its existence to this challenge. Thanks to DARPA, you can now buy a lidar that you can stick on top of a car and which gives you 360 degree range data in 3D at 10 Hz over Ethernet. Now that the company is jump-started, next year those specs will improve, costs will go down, and eventually something like this will be driving your car for you. That's the benefit everyone gets from this competition. Not to mention all the people whose imaginations have been captured by the competition; who have been working on the funding DARPA gave out, getting their PhDs, or even just working in their spare time, learning how to write the software to run these things. There's no doubt in my mind that DARPA has gotten far more mileage from their money in this contest than they would have dumping it in the accounts of some defense contractor.

So even though no open source was produced from the contest, the public will see a lot of benefit from the money DARPA has spent.

Re:Congrats..

Ahhhh.. *lightbulb*

Carnegie Mellon's algorithm

//crossing an intersection
if(OtherCars.SignallingToCross())
{
Me.Stop();
Me.WaitForClear();
}

OshKosh Truck's modified algorithm (copied)

//crossing an intersection
if(OtherCars.SignallingToCross())
{
//Me.Stop();
//Me.WaitForClear();
Me.BuzzHorn(Max_Vol);
}