DARPA Grand Challenge A Real Race At Last? 173
museumpeace writes "News.com has posted its second story in a week on a hopeful Grand Challenge contender. Stanford's Stanley, a VW Touareg run by 100,000 lines of code can hit 40 mph and has now traversed all but 3 miles of last year's desert course without problems. A few days earlier, Carnegie Mellon University's Team Red announced that its Sandstorm, a modified Hummer, had run 200 miles without any problems though on a closed track. DARPA cut the field to 40 in June and will cut it to 20 before the race in October."
Publicity for VW... (Score:3, Insightful)
20? What are the elimination criteria? (Score:4, Insightful)
Specifically, if no one has ever done this successfully before, how the heck do they know what a successful approach looks like?
I understand dropping the obvious non-starters - teams whose vehicles crash or get lost on a small test course, or teams whose vehicles are not ready to go at all - both of these are valid rejection criteria.
But it seems really silly to set an abitrary number at "exactly 20"; the article doesn't really explain how the decision on whether or not your vehicle "makes the cut", other than "was evaluated by DARPA experts" - who have yet to solve the problem themselves.
-- Terry
Re:The worlds most boring race (Score:3, Insightful)
What does it mean when someone says they ran "last year's course" without a problem?
Does the car take to the road knowing nothing of the obstacles ahead or has it been programmed to avoid the hazards revealed in a year's study of the route?
Re:20? What are the elimination criteria? (Score:4, Insightful)
But seriously, I beleive those vehicles that could not complete a closed obstacle course were eliminated. It has occured to you that autonomous vehicles do present a huge safety hazard (especially those with a 200-mile range), therefore they can't let just anybody participate in this, hasn't it?
Just wondering... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yay! We are that much closer to Killdozer! (Score:4, Insightful)
Last I looked, the ratio of support personnel to fighting personnel was something like 7:1 in the modern military. That means that for every person whose primary job is actually killing people, there are seven people whose primary job involves support functions. One of the big support functions is "get this stuff from point A to point B."
While sometimes "get supplies from point A to point B" can be rather hazardous -- our supply units in Iraq can talk about that -- it can also quite often be boring, repetitive, and relatively safe. Being able to send supplies to the front lines without having to equip a truck with people will help alleviate this need.
The DoD spends many billions of dollars on research every year. The really sexy research -- "how do we kill people better, faster, and in more bulk?" -- gets the most coverage, but a very significant chunk of their research is around things that are not directly related to the whole "kill or be kill" thing -- for example, the internet.
Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Insightful)