DARPA Grand Challenge Finalists Announced

Xerotope writes "DARPA announced today the 23 finalists[pdf warning] of the DARPA Grand Challenge at the closing ceremonies of the National Qualifying Event. Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team will start on Saturday with the first and third positions, with 'H1ghlander' taking the pole position and 'Sandstorm' following 10 minutes later. Stanford's 'Stanley' will start second. Of the 43 semi-finalists, 23 robots managed to finish the 2.2 mile course at least once. 5 robots (Stanford, Red Team, Red Team Too, Axion Racing, and Team Teramax) completed all of their runs. CMU's 'H1ghlander' and 'Sandstorm' finished the four runs with an average time of 10 minutes, 20 seconds each. Stanford's Stanley average time was 10:43."

Terminator or Explorer?

[digitaldc]

The question is...Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons? Or, will it be used in a more gentile fashion to explore hostile environments such as the Moon, Mars and the other planets?
Let's hope this technology will be used to advance our understanding of our planet and the universe.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[exi1ed0ne]

The answer to what use they will put this to: Whatever they can get away with.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[SpyPlane]

I don't know about these being used as unmanned 'weapons', but certainly the military will use them for transport vehicles. The real reason for this competition was to create technology that would save lives. This is even more appropriate now that a majority of deaths over in Iraq are due to road side bombs. Right now, weapon control systems will still have a human somewhere in the loop.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Have Blue]

Hopefully it will go into the scientific community and then onto the open market, where it can be used by any party for any purpose.

We can't even imagine the uses this will be put to

[John Jorsett]

The answer of course is that, once autonomous vehicles are possible and proven, the door is open to any use. The military will use them to deliver supplies, and so will relief organizations. Private companies will use them to transport materials for, for example, the building of remote pipelines or roads. Ranchers will use them to patrol the boundaries of their acreage. Security companies will employ autonomous vehicles to keep an eye on the perimeters of land they're guarding. Universities will use them to explore the arctic, antarctic, and other hostile environments. Radical nutjobs will use them to deliver deadly payloads instead of using human beings. And there will be a host of applications that we haven't even thought of yet.

Re:well if the summary isn't going to explain it..

[Spy der Mann]

Well, I think it's good to use robotic soldiers to spare soldiers' lives... but shouldn't the enemy have their own robotic soldiers, too?

Otherwise, it won't be a war. It will be a masacre.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Zathrus]

Will this technology be used primarily for unmanned military weapons?

This phase is intentionally designed for developing unmanned transport vehicles for use in low/no traffic, rugged areas. Think resupply and medivac. That alone would vastly reduce support overhead and threat to support troops (who generally aren't wandering around in heavily armored vehicles like front line troops).

It's not designed for use as a weapons platform (there is no ability to determine threats or potential targets), nor for usage on other planets -- all of the vehicles make use of GPS to some degree (they can operate without, but are handicapped) and we don't exactly have constellations of sats flying around any other stellar bodies.

The military isn't particularly interested in completely autonomous weapon systems -- it's too damn dangerous to your own people. The last thing you need is an autonomous anti-tank or anti-infantry mis-identifying your own (or your allies) weapons/troops as targets and eliminating them. We have enough friendly fire problems with humans at the controls -- and robots are far, far behind humans when it comes to properly identifying things.

There's plenty of civilian uses too -- another reply already mentioned a good number of them.

progress on the cheap

[Douglas Simmons]

These DARPA competitions (and those of other organizations) have got to be one of the best ways to come up with new and useful technology. Instead of rowboat races, the bright and motivated students of top universities (as well as other entusiasts) compete against each other for a battle of imagination and ingenuity to win not useless trophies but the thrill of having created something of potential practical use. Also, these competitions help boost the reputations of the colleges and universities as these often get media coverage, and if you've noticed, they've got their school's name on their autonomous submarines. And of course, DARPA gets some cheap R&D.

Still too slow

[Krater76]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's very difficult to cover 150 miles in 10 hours, obviously, you need a minimum speed of 15 mph. Their 2.2-mile semifinal course had a best average time of 10:20. That's still just under 13 mph. If the average time was 8 minutes or less I'd be excited.

Don't get me wrong I'm very impressed with the results so far but it might just not be enough. Here's to hoping that they can make up some time elsewhere.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Kozz]

This phase is intentionally designed for developing unmanned transport vehicles for use in low/no traffic, rugged areas. Think resupply and medivac. That alone would vastly reduce support overhead and threat to support troops (who generally aren't wandering around in heavily armored vehicles like front line troops).

Well, that sounds good, in theory. Now I admittedly don't know what sort of AI or algorithms these autonomous vehicles are using to navigate and make "decisions", but if you've got an unmanned vehicle with supplies (read: easy target), it would still need to be protected from "abduction". I'd imagine a vehicle like this would probably stop cold if surrounded (360 degrees of obstacles) by other vehicles, at which point the abductees could take what's inside, and leave. Unless this vehicle is also accompanied by manned and armed escorts. And at that point, why not just give the escorts a remote control, rather than all that fancy AI/computer gear?

Then again, I'm not any sort of military strategist, nor do I really know anything about the battlefield. But it seems to me that military uses wouldn't be the best choice for this hypothetical tool. Or am I overlooking the solutions to these problems I've mentioned above?

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Stonehand]

Yeah, you could do pretty interesting things with it.

Combine it with a rental system, for instance -- and have it meet you at your doorstep and drive you to your destination. And then drive itself back to to wherever it next needs to be.

One could also see it being useful for the elderly -- those with poor eyesight or reflexes, and who don't want to have to depend on somebody else to drive them. Ditto for others not able to drive themselves. Maybe you won't need designated drivers anymore.

Theoretically, an autonomous vehicle should be able to pick up one's kids and drive them elsewhere if it's scheduled (time and location) and the parents are both busy, but I have my doubts as to whether this would be a good thing to do.

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[Scrameustache]

technology that would save lives. This is even more appropriate now that a majority of deaths over in Iraq are due to road side bombs.

No.

A majority of U.S. casualties are due to road side bombs.
The majority of deaths in Iraq is no that of U.S. forces, however.

Maybe the technology will save soldier's lives, but it will mostly free up soldier's time to go shoot at those people you don't even count as "lives".

Re:Terminator or Explorer?

[mother pussbucket]

Just like the a-bomb.

Manhattan project scientist: "but we never thought they'd use it..."

Funking dipsticks.

Re:well if the summary isn't going to explain it..

[Stonehand]

Considering that "humanitarians" frequently go on and on about how human life is paramount, that for a home owner to not take EVERY means to de-escalate a situation including running away from his own property, and that to defend yourself is to be judge, jury and executioner -- you'd think you WOULD love that.

Because, of course, it doesn't matter if they burn your house and steal your property; you're not supposed to value your property over their life. Gosh, they might even be mentally ill and therefore it's not really their fault. Oh well.

(And yes, that's the sort of argument one hears an awful lot... on Fark, anyway.)

On a less incendiary note, you should take note that it's not infrequently the slightly disadvantaged side that starts wars -- but that they do not necessarily fully realize their own difficulties. For example: In retrospect, a sane analysis should have indicated that the Confederacy, with much inferior manpower, industrial base, and naval forces and no real advantage in doctrine (officers in both sides having been trained through the same system) was essentially doomed barring a sudden shock that would make war politically unpalatable for the North. The "one of ours is worth ten of theirs because our boys learned to shoot when young" spiel and other myths, however, combined with bravado to apparently mislead them. Were they facing a force that they could not see any means to defeat, they probably wouldn't have started a war, and a rather great number of people wouldn't have died. You wouldn't have had the abuses of Reconstruction, and perhaps the South would have been less ready for the rise of the Klan.

It might also have been suggested that for Germany and Japan to have thought they could win against the rest of the world over the long haul was insane, based on population, area, resource distribution, and so forth. Japan, in particular, had vulnerable supply lines... It took an awful lot of inhumanity to prove them wrong.

But if Saddam -knew- that the US would have intervened after the Kuwait situation, and he -knew- that the US had not only the military means but the political will to defeat him utterly, would he have gone ahead anyway? Assuming that he was even slightly rational, he probably would have backed down instead of trying to enforce his territorial claims, and we wouldn't have ended up with years of sanctions hurting his general population while illicit oil revenue found its way into his palaces. Wars start when people think they can win, even when they're actually wrong.