Eleven Finalists in Pentagon's Robotic Rally 64
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."
Drivers' tests and Pentagon competitions (Score:5, Funny)
After all, they still let women drive.
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Re:Drivers' tests and Pentagon competitions (Score:4, Funny)
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Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday November 02, @11:26AM
Re:Drivers' tests and Pentagon competitions (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'll bet that really endears us to the locals and makes them more likely to have positive feelings towards Americans. When you hear about how well our ambassadors on the ground are behaving, you almost wonder why the Iraqis aren't embracing us with open arms.
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One of my uncles was a contractor in Angola during the civil war and he nearly went to jail for dangerous driving after coming back.
Apparently many anti-tank mines have a delayed fuse so that they blow up under the middle of the tank. If you drive at 70mph+ it blows up behind you. After 3 years of working down there he was having a panic attack every time his speed dropped under 50.
Frankly if they can get away with reprogramming without having to undergo therapy they are very lucky.
Kind of like an Emergency Vehicle? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, I hate it when those damn Ambulances, Fire Engines, and Police Cruisers just tear through the neighborhood with their sirens blaring and those damn lights flashing. Where do they get off driving ninety miles an hour, ignoring stop signs, refusing to yield the right of way, and cutting off pedestrian traffic?
How dare they! I mean, it isn't like anyone's life is on the line, right?
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The US Army is great at fighting other Geneva Convention signers. But those ethics also form a weakness. If you're the sort of pe
Oblig bash quote (Score:1)
My robot does this too....it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls.
Just like woman drivers, I guess.
Re:Drivers' tests and Pentagon competitions (Score:4, Interesting)
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My mother was a commercial rep for Bayers and drove a lot in her life, she imparted two essential rules of driving to me
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True. They could have just moved the competition to downtown Boston.
Its being streamed live... (Score:1)
Next challenge (Score:5, Funny)
So when is that event scheduled, and will it be on pay per view?
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So when is that event scheduled, and will it be on pay per view?
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So when is that event scheduled, and will it be on pay per view?
From http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ [darpa.mil]
The Urban Challenge Final Event on November 3 will be webcast live at www.grandchallenge.org, starting at 7:30 am PT.
Time change for event start on November 3! Grounds continue to open at 6:00 AM PT for spectators, but the opening ceremony will begin at 7:30 AM, and vehicles will begin to launch at 8:00 AM.
GPS + Humans are not better (Score:5, Funny)
Seeing the vidoes on YouTube like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh-B3rysxIA [youtube.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7La09EBLf-Q [youtube.com]
or stories about people driving into lakes and flooded roads "because GPS told them to"
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"
truck driver who drove his lorry into a river, not knowing that the bridge he intended to use was no longer there
etc
I'd say pass the control to the machines as soon as possible....
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Perhaps it was about urban legends and I didn't get the intro...
Back of the truck myth (Score:2)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RMLt28n0-M [youtube.com]
And then I saw this (Score:2, Funny)
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I miss read that to be "Elvin Finalists"... (Score:2, Funny)
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I've been thinking about this and I have a possible answer. Most, if not all, lasers used in rangefinding are some form of red. A blue car does not reflect red light (or at least not enough red light) and if you took a photo of it with a red filter (only allowing red light to pass through) it would appear black or very close too it. So basically, the lasers that are being use
Counterintuitive (Score:2, Insightful)
Less obstacles in the same horizontal plane? (Score:2)
And I'd really like to know if one's overhead - with a crash there is a serious chance of these things dropping, say, in the middle of traffic. Altitude + gravity makes for an awful lot of kinetic energy to disperse on impact..
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2) The defence industry has a fair bit of experience making difficult-to-jam communications systems. That one's probably easier to deal with than #1.
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Car that drives itself was a solved problem 20 years or so ago. Car that drives itself and can safely integrate with _people_ who are driving, that's a different matter.
Good enough for government work! (Score:3, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:2)
That seems to be the current trend in military robot failures.
Friend of mine is competing in this... (Score:3, Insightful)
--- BEGIN 644 conspiracytheory.txt ---
Anyway - I heard Wed. that they were out of the competition - more-or-less arbitrarily. It sounds to me like DARPA already knew, going in to this, who they wanted the finalists to be. Stanford (the previous winner), CMU, Oshkosh - they're all there.
Last time DARPA basically did the same thing to Team Jefferson. They just said "you guys are done" when they showed up to re-try a test -- after they'd spent 30+ hours doing energency repairs after hitting a barrier. I'm getting the distinct impression they don't want anybody small in this thing. TJ has spent a fraction of the other teams' development costs and for some reason that scares DARPA.
Quit whining. (Score:5, Interesting)
As the head of a team that lost in 2005, I don't think so. The 2005 competition was run fairly. The Marine colonel who ran the thing was tough, but fair. The only extra consideration I saw given to a team was that CMU got to have a Discovery Channel camera crew in the starting gate area, which, under the rules, was limited to two people per team.
In the Urban Challenge, if you hit a stationary object, you weren't ready to compete at that level. Back in 2004, 'bots were hitting stationary obstacles all over the place. Some went off road and rolled over. Oshkosh Truck/OSU not only hit a parked SUV, it pushed it for a while until someone hit the remote emergency stop. (That's why Oshkosh Truck dumped OSU, pulled the project in-house, and finished in 2005, using their huge truck.) CMU hit a fence placed by DARPA just before the event. CMU's vehicle, in 2004, wasn't really autonomous, just preprogrammed. They had a trailer full of people manually planning the route in the two hours before the event, using data obtained via overflights of the area with LIDAR-equipped aircraft. The 2004 Grand Challenge was embarrassing for everyone involved, including DARPA. The press reports made it look like a joke.
In 2005, everybody who made it to Fontana had something better than anybody had in 2004. There were very few collisions. It was striking, being at the raceway in Fontana, and seeing 43 large, autonomous vehicles, all of which basically worked. There'd been enormous progress in a year and a half. Mobile robotics wasn't a joke any more. We were out of the Comedy Channel/Robot Wars era, and into the ESPN/NASCAR era. With NASCAR-sized budgets for some teams, but not all. Some small teams were successful. Although "small", in this game, means mid six figures to low seven figures.
This year, DARPA insists you not hit anything. Urban Challenge vehicles have to drive in traffic. There are cars with human drivers on the course. Complaining about being eliminated after a collision with a stationary barrier is just whining.
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Re:Quit whining. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Add some guns (Score:2)
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55% Were safe to drive (Score:3, Insightful)
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That's better odds than the people they're giving licenses to in this country.
Why isn't it modded troll already? What you mean by all these people not being safe to drive is that they can sometimes behave dangerously, forget their blinker, not give you your due priority, occasionally get involved in minor accidents, etc... Here, the 45% deemed unsafe are deemed so because they can't drive an hour without leaving the road and rolling over or systematically hitting obstacles. Not quite the same thing..
Safety Last (Score:1)
Middle Earth Finalists... (Score:1)