PRIMM, Nev. – It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: an army of driverless vehicles crossing the Mojave Desert guided by an array of sophisticated software that could one day spare soldiers the risks of battle.
On Saturday, four robots zipped across the finish line of a 132-mile race through the desert on a quest for a $2 million prize to help develop next-generation war machines. The robot pack was led by a design from Stanford University.
“The impossible has been achieved,” said Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, whose teammates doused him with water after the checkered flag went down.
The winner of the $2 million prize was not immediately declared, because 22 of the 23 contestants sprinted from the starting line at staggered times, racing against the clock rather than each other.
The last vehicle to run, a modified Ford SUV, got caught in brush less than a mile from the starting line.
This year’s Pentagon-sponsored race showcased a dramatic leap in robotics technology since 2004’s inaugural competition, which ended without a winner after none of the vehicles was able to cross the finish line.
Carnegie Mellon University’s Humvee, dubbed Sandstorm, chugged the fastest last year despite covering only 71/2 miles. Sandstorm competed again this year and finished the course.
“I’m on top of the world,” William “Red” Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor, said after his other entry, a red Hummer named H1ghlander, arrived at the finish line on Saturday.
The sentimental favorite, a Ford Escape Hybrid by students in Metairie, La., was the fourth vehicle to finish Saturday. The team lost about a week of practice, and some lost their homes, when Hurricane Katrina blew into the Gulf Coast.
Race officials planned to resume racing today so the sole robot left – a mammoth six-wheel truck – could compete in daylight.
The vehicles were equipped with the latest sensors, lasers, cameras and radar to feed information to onboard computers, which helped the robots distinguish a dangerous boulder from a tumbleweed and decide whether a chasm was too deep to cross.
Within the first hour of the race, a half-dozen vehicles were knocked out by sensor problems. Even so, most covered more distance than Sandstorm last year. As the day went on, more vehicles were sidelined because of problems, including a flat tire.
The race was sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The agency will award the taxpayer-funded prize to the vehicle that completes the course the quickest.
The race is part of the Pentagon’s effort to fulfill a congressional mandate to cut causalities by having a third of the military ground vehicles unmanned by 2015.
The military currently has a small fleet of autonomous ground vehicles stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the machines must be remotely controlled by a soldier, who usually rides in the same convoy.
The unmanned vehicles used their computer brains and sensing devices to follow a programmed route consisting of rough, winding desert roads and dry lake beds filled with overhanging brush and rocks. They also had to pass through three tunnels designed to knock out their GPS signals.
About five miles from the finish line was a tricky 1.3-mile mountain pass dubbed “Beer Bottle Pass” because of its shape. The mountain ridge – similar to the mountain canyons found in Afghanistan – was only 10 feet wide and had a 200-foot dropoff. The finishers navigated that section with no problems.
Associated Press
Stanford Racing Team’s Stanford Roadrunner is the first vehicle to cross the finish line of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 2005 Grand Challenge robot race on Saturday.
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