DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 164
fishdan wrote to mention that the Darpa Grand Challenge is getting underway again. The qualifying rounds started yesterday. National media has picked up on the story, with pieces at the Washington Post and Seattle Times. From the Post: "The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the Oct. 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge. The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control. Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles _ hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars _ while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers."
The amazing failures of AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did AI research implode for lack of funding, or is it really that hard? Will we need Cray-like computing power to handle the sensory input quickly enough to work a steering wheel, brake and gas pedal? Or has this problem simply never been tackled by sufficiently big money? And, given the obvious military implications and a $400 Billion military budget alone, why not?
All these questions are quite serious, and I'd be interested in hearing answers.
Axion twin power activate! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes I know, shamelessy stolen from Cruel.
Re:Good luck contestants (Score:3, Interesting)
I recommend that if any of you follow the race to pay particular attention to those teams who aren't getting in the papers. I'm most impressed by the teams who aren't university based. Most of them have little sponsorship and are just working guys spending their *own* cash on their vehicle. I purposely didn't name names of any teams because so many posts about the DGC have become spamvertisements here on Slashdot. *cough* CMU *cough* Oops.
Sebastian Thrun/Stanford (Score:1, Interesting)
"So Thrun pioneered what's known as probabilistic robotics. He programs his machines to adjust their responses to incoming data based on the probability that the data are correct. In last year's DARPA race, many derailments occurred when a 'bot's sensors provided faulty information, causing it to, for example, mistake a tumbleweed for a rock and stop in its tracks. Thrun's car didn't go off the cliff mentioned above, because its software ignored the bad GPS data (which it judged to have a significant probability of error) and responded instead to the more accurate laser readings. (If the car hadn't made the right choice, Thrun or a colleague would have hit two giant red buttons next to the wheel to disable the AI.)
By early July, Thrun's car had navigated 88 miles of last year's route. It would have logged more, but the pace car got a flat tire after its (human) driver failed to avoid a bump in the road."
Re:Destroyed? (Score:3, Interesting)
Estimates on brain power (Score:5, Interesting)
In comparison, the world's fastest supercomputer (BlueGene/L) is rated at a maximum of 183,500 gigaflots, which is about 0.2 peta flops, or one fiftieth of the maximum speed of the human brain.
Now, you don't NEED the full processing power of the human brain in order to drive. That's not my point. My point is that a car-load of computer parts, at the current level of technology, is probably going to drive about as well as a Horseshoe Crab. I'm actually very impressed that developers have actually got as far as they have, as they're very unlikely to be using state-of-the-art technology for this, most are probably using pile-of-PC architectures, not much more than some webcams for vision and basic motors for the robot linkage, most likely continuous for power - steppers have vastly superior accuracy but have no force behind them.
You also have to look at the power cleaning systems they need - car batteries are NOT smooth and car electrical systems are typically pretty rough. On the other hand, computers need power that is spike-free and ADCs (analog-to-digital converters) rely on a steady reference voltage to be able to do anything useful. A noisy power system would be Bad News for a self-operating vehicle. Oh, and computers don't do well when hot, but air conditioning units - particularly if they switch on and off - are going to add some serious noise to the power.
Whoever builds a car that can go a decent distance is worthy of vast respect and awe, because there are some massive technical problems that require ingenious hacking of mechanical, electrical and microelectronic systems to operate in some pretty harsh environments.
I do think DARPA would be foolish to end the contest if there is a winner this year - rather, they should extend the challenge. Have the vehicles go through a wider range of terrains, as a multi-stage rally, perhaps, with cars who succeed in the desert then having to navigate through a forest, swamps, along the tops of snow-covered mountains - pretty much any terrain that a vehicle could realistically encounter if used for military missions.
If DARPA did that, and the contestents succeeded, then (and pretty much only then) would DARPA have a general-purpose robotic vehicle they could throw into any arena that would be hazardous for humans under combat conditions. Why stop when you have something that could have made things easier three years ago had it existed, but which may be useless in a scenario three years from now, when the dangers may be completely different?
Re:No Driver Required... (Score:4, Interesting)
Modern automatic transmission are very good. I have a 2003 Accord and it's the best automatic I've ever driven. Shifting is very smooth, and downshifting occurs when it is supposed to. It uses what Honda calls "Grade Logic Technology" which basically detecs when you're going uphill or downhill to determine whether to downshift or upshift much sooner than older automatic transmissions. It's also a 5 speed automatic which helps a lot. I believe Mercedes has a 7 speed automatic in their newer cars though I haven't driven them.
Re:This is very cool (Score:3, Interesting)
You can see interviews and a video here [agilent.com]. The team's website is here [ghostriderrobot.com].