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DARPA Grand Challenge

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The DARPA Grand Challenge is a United States government-sponsored competition that aims to create the first fully autonomous vehicles capable of competing on an under-300 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert in the Southwest United States. This annual challenge took place for the first time on March 13, 2004 and was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense.

2007 Urban Challenge
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2007 Urban Challenge

Contents

History

The history of autonomous cars starts in 1977 with a vehicle of the Tsuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan. On a dedicated, clearly marked course it achieved speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, by tracking white street markers (special hardware was necessary, since commercial computers were much slower than they are today). The breakthrough in autonomous driving came in the 1980s through the work of Ernst Dickmanns and his team at Bundeswehr Universität München. Their vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robot van achieved 60 miles per hour on streets without traffic. The subsequent 800 million Euro EU project Prometheus on autonomous vehicles (1987-1995) brought further progress. A culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1000 mile trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 110 miles per hour on the German Autobahn. Unlike the early robot cars it drove in traffic, executing maneuvers to pass other cars. The abilities of Dickmanns' cars heavily influenced research world-wide, including three DARPA efforts known as Demo I, Demo II, Demo III. Demo III (2001) demonstrated the ability of unmanned ground vehicles to navigate miles of difficult offroad terrain, avoiding obstacles such as rocks and trees.

The Grand Challenge was the first distance competition for robot cars in the United States; to date, there have been other competitions for semi-autonomous vehicles, but none on the scale of the Grand Challenge. The U.S. Department of Defense has permitted DARPA to offer prize money ($1 million) to facilitate robotic development, with the ultimate goal of making one third of ground military forces automated by 2015. Following the 2004 event, Dr. Tony Tether, the director of DARPA, announced that the prize money had been increased to $2 million for the next event, which was claimed on October 9, 2005.

The competition was open to all U.S. citizens and organizations, including high school and college students, businesses and other organizations. More than 100 teams registered in the first year, bringing a wide variety of technological skills to the race. In the second year, 195 teams from 36 states and 4 foreign countries entered the race.

2004 Grand Challenge

In the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, none of the robot vehicles came even close to meeting the challenge. Carnegie Mellon's Red Team travelled the farthest distance, completing 7.4 miles of the course.

2005 Grand Challenge

The 2005 Grand Challenge began at 6:40am on October 8, 2005. This time "Stanley", the robotic Volkswagen Touareg of "The Stanford Racing Team", beat the field—completing the 132-mile race with a winning time of 6 hours 53 minutes and 58 seconds. Four other vehicles successfully completed the race. These were 2nd place: CMU's Sandstorm at 7hr 4m; 3rd place: CMU's H1ghlander at 7hr 14m; 4th place: Gray Team's Kat-5 at 7hr 30m and finally, not within the 10 hour time limit but 5th place: TerraMax at 12hr 51m. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 7.36 mile distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race.

2007 Urban Challenge

The 2007 Grand Challenge, which is also known as the DARPA Urban Challenge, will take place on November 3, 2007. The course will involve a 60 mile mock urban area course, to be completed in fewer than 6 hours. Rules will include the obeying of traffic laws while negotiating other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. The major prizes are US$2 million for first place, US$500,000 for second place, and US$250,000 for third place. DARPA also announced that it will allow teams to submit proposals for up to US$1 Million in development funds. [link]

Basic Rules

DARPA is conducting this challenge in association with SCORE International Off-Road Racing.

See also

External links

Official Sites

Team Sites

TV Specials

 

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