Eleven Finalists in Pentagon's Robotic Rally

An anonymous reader writes "A mere 11 driverless vehicles — not the 20 originally planned — will compete in this weekend's $3.5 million all-robot street rally, hosted by the Pentagon. After a series of crashes, dangerous turns, and aimless wanderings off of the course, the rest of the robo-cars in the "Urban Challenge" were deemed unsafe to compete."

Re:GPS + Humans are not better

[Silver Sloth]

man who went to the back of his RV while still on the highway to have some coffee, when he crashed, he sued the company for not stating in the manual that "the car does not turn by itself"

Er... no. Check your Urban legends first [snopes.com]

Re:Quit whining.

[SwordsmanLuke]

A number of teams were eliminated this year without hitting anything.

Yup. I work for a small company which was competing in the Urban Challenge. We haven't hit anything (or even come close to hitting anything), but we got cut yesterday as well. It took us by surprise. We understand that collisions are a Bad Thing, but if our vehicle is just a tad more cautious than the other vehicles - why is that bad enough to warrant elimination?

For the record though, I doubt if the eliminations were rigged. True, only a few small companies made it to the finals, but I think that has more to do with small companies also having small budgets and not being able to afford the same level of investment as larger firms. Also, a number of Track A teams (which DARPA has already made a not-insignificant investment in) were cut, my company included.