Carnegie Mellon Wins DARPA Urban Challenge
Would it be a bad pun to call this a major milestone?
This past weekend, 11 finalists for the DARPA Urban Challenge — a prize competition for driverless cars — wove their way through a 60-mile course at the U.S. Army urban warfare training center in Victorville, California (formerly the housing area at the now-closed George Air Force Base).
Only 6 teams finished, with Carnegie Mellon’s Tartan Racing Team taking the $2 million development prize. Defense Industry Daily was there, and has some amazing reporting:
[DARPA had the] guts to invite in the world press and the general public while trying something new to the world: Turning multiple autonomous vehicles loose on city streets at the same time, interspersed with human drivers. As [DARPA Director Dr. Tony] Tether said at the start of the program, "If anyone tells you he knows what’s going to happen, he’s lying."
Since that test could likely take every bit of a short November day, the teams, staff and press assembled for their briefings at a chilly and dark 0600 hours. The day featured robot traffic jams, the world’s first ‘bot vs. ‘bot collision, and the Terramax robot truck’s attempt to take out the old air base PX.
DID has some great pictures of the event, and video of the bots making their way through the streets can be found on the DARPA website.
Automotive Design Line has additional details on the competition and rules:
The competitor autonomous vehicles had to obey California traffic laws and were penalized for any violations. The three top teams had no infractions and were thus ranked solely by time in completing each of three "missions"—coming in with total times staggered by intervals of about twenty minutes. In addition to the robots, nearly 50 vehicles with professional drivers were on the course at the same time to simulate traffic situations.
The competition was close — Carnegie Mellon won with an average 14 mph throughout the course, while the second and third place finishers (Stanford and Virginia Tech, respectively) averaged just about and just under 13 mph. All of the top 3 teams finished the course in less than 6 hours. (MIT came in fourth place.)
More from Wired:
Tether couldn’t have been more pleased with the race, calling it a "fantastic accomplishment," and saying that the technology for robotic vehicles was now just about ready for other companies and organizations to pick up the work in honing it further. "DARPA is an interesting organization," he said. "We really never finish anything. All we really do is show that it can be done. We take the technical excuse off the table, to the point where other people can no longer say ‘Hey this is a very interesting idea, but you know that you can’t do it.’ I think that we’re close to that point, that it’s time for this technology to [be furthered] by somebody else."
While five teams didn’t make it to the finish of the course (due to several "vehicle vs. building incidents"), there were no reports (that we’ve heard) of bot road rage.
