On November 3, thirty six of the worlds most advanced autonomous vehicles will be competing against each other to be declared the most advanced. Each will not only be required to demonstrate complex navigational and problem solving skills, but they will also be required to understand rules of the road.
Stanford University took home the prize with their Volkswagen Touareg “Stanley” at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Stanley was the first in history to successfully navigate through miles of desert terrain, avoiding pitfalls that killed all but five other competitors. As difficult as ’05 Grand Challenge was, it was could be boiled down to a basic obstacle avoidance problem. When a robot approached another robot to pass, the DARPA chase vehicle would send a command to the slowpoke and tell it to yield the road to the robot behind him. (You should have seen the observation tent where all the teams were watching their robots in action on scores of plasma screens when Stanford’s robot Stanley passed up Carnegie Mellon media sweetheart Sandstorm. They went nuts!) Anyway, the point is that back in my day, we were given a file of GPS coordinates to which the robots had to drive one at a time. Along the way, the ‘bots had to be smart enough to avoid obstacles and be built durably enough to withstand the kinds of things you’d expect in mountainous desert–a good transmission, puncture resistant tires, lots of gas, and so on. When something tricky came up like a robot wanting to pass, a human intervened and effectively made the forward vehicle an obstacle to the robot behind it. The robot behind it just avoided it.
This year at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, there’ll be none of that. Navigation and obstacle avoidance is so 2005. Not only will the ‘bots be required to demonstrate robust navigational skills, they’ll have to be able to discover alternate routes because primary routes will be randomly blocked. Not only will robots be required to demonstrate their passing abilities, they will need to determine when it’s safe to pass. They’re even going to have to drive into oncoming traffic to pass the vehicle in front of it. At a four-way stop, the ‘bots will have to respect the rules of a stop-and-go intersection–a feat not usually performed well by many human drivers! You have to wonder how many of the teams had to Google the rules before they coded ’em in.
This event is a big deal. It is bringing together some of the greatest minds and technologies in the world in order to force the advancement of autonomous transportation. We civilians have got better things to do with our time than to drive to and from work every day. My commute is an hour each way. That’s 10 hours that I could be doing something productive. Our soldiers have got better things to do than die driving a transport vehicle full of ammo down Mainstreet, Bagdad–like live.
