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."

Congratulations!

[S.Cohen]

Congrats to the winners and all the other contestants!

Any opensource out of this ?

[noddyxoi]

So these guys get some millions from public funding and does the public get any opensource out of it ?

The importance of this race cannot be overstated

[IanDanforth]

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?

Open source ...if only.

[seanthenerd]

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.

Editorial discretion

[Triv]

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

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[seanthenerd]

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:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[pinkocommie]

I don't think its about that per se. It's about finding and implementing the most efficient transportation mechanism. If you could develop a fully automated system, you wouldn't need to own cars since they could be available on demand. How many hours are cars driven vs garaged, one could reduce the total number of automobiles by a factor of 5 if not more.
I remember seeing an article on here a while ago about mass transit that went to each neighborhood but instead of trains were 4 passenger vehicles that were fully automated.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[Cassius Corodes]

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

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[Novae D'Arx]

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:Any opensource out of this ?

[Chris Pimlott]

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:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[Erioll]

Most freedoms are privileges (from a pure survival standpoint I mean), yet we've made them rights because we feel they make for a better society overall. Be VERY careful whenever you want to clamp down on something we've had choice in for quite a long time.

Re:Congratulations!

[MyLongNickName]

If "ironic" = "moderator is an inbred moron", then I agree.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[timeOday]

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.

Re:Any opensource out of this ?

[Spy Hunter]

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:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[Spy Hunter]

Firstly, a car you can't ever drive would never sell in the US. People want control, they want the ability to drive off-road even if they never actually do (see SUVs), and they love their older cars too much to stop driving them. Secondly, even if every car was automated, that would only take care of a *few* of the problems faced by automated vehicles. They would still have to deal with all of the problems that are caused by things other than unpredictable drivers, such as: wind, rain, snow, ice, fog, loss of GPS, worn or obscured road markings, people walking in the road, things that fall from trucks on the freeway, tires that blow out, malfunctioning traffic signals, downed power lines, mechanical failures of all kinds, collapsed bridges, avalanches, sinkholes, people trying to trick the robot sensors, and all the other problems I didn't happen to think of just now. If you really want your robotic car to be 100% safe, you have to program it to handle so many varied situations that I believe programming it with traffic rules for safe driving around humans would be a relatively small part of your work.

Now it's true that you could drive more efficiently without humans, but that will have to be phased in gradually. For example, you could have special robot lanes, and perhaps eventually entire robot-only streets in big cities. But that would only be possible *after* the introduction of autonomous vehicles.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[evilviper]

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.

You're exaggerating, in the extreme.

I'm willing to bet every (human) driver in this country would have succeeded with flying colors on this course as well. In fact the odds of a driver getting killed in an accident any specific day are extremely slim, and they'd be much smaller still, if you restrict that to low-speed driving, during the day, etc., etc.

The skill of these robotic drivers can only be determined with any reasonable accuracy after they have driven many MILLIONS of miles. Only then can you say they are, on average, safer than human drivers. And even then, it would still be insanely ridiculous to claim they drive flawlessly.

Re:The importance of this race cannot be overstate

[Da Fokka]

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.