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The race to supply the Pentagon with robot vehicles heats up

When the Pentagon's research arm held a million-dollar race last year for autonomously controlled robot vehicles, the results were not exactly a US military success.

None of the computer-controlled vehicles made it far past the desert starting line, bumping into obstacles, breaking down or careening madly out of control.

What a difference a year makes. The US still hasn't gotten its way in Iraq, but at least DARPA's Grand Challenge looks like being a success.

In three days of qualifying rounds this week, about a dozen teams managed to nimbly navigate a four-km obstacle course inside southern California's Fontana Speedway circuit to qualify for the Saturday's prize race. Several other teams that did well in qualifying will join the final race to bring the number of contestants to 20.

"It was far better than my personal expectations," said Anthony Tether, the head of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The course will only be announced two hours before the race, to make sure that all navigation is conducted by the vehicles' global positioning systems.

But contestants are expected to have to travel some 250km across a desert route starting in Primm, Nevada, using only onboard sensors, navigation equipment and computers to find and follow the route and avoid obstacles. The robots also have to heed speed limits in certain zones and pass through a tunnel designed to temporarily knock out their GPS capabilities.

DARPA, which is widely credited with developing the Internet, will award US$2 million to the team whose autonomous vehicle successfully completes the route the fastest within a 10-hour time period. If no vehicle succeeds, the prize will be rolled over to next year's event, when the winner will net US$4 million.

The Pentagon hopes the competition will yield far more than merely expensive new toys.

It's part of the Pentagon's efforts to have a third of the military's ground vehicles unmanned by 2015 to fulfil a mandate by the US Congress.

Or as the military announcer at the qualifying rounds put it as the largest entrant -- a 15.25 tonne, six-wheel truck made by the Oshkosh Truck Co. and Ohio State University called TerraMax -- rumbled through the course: "That's what it's all about: a whole bunch of those things on the Baghdad highway, resupplying our troops."

Some of the other entrants look unlikely candidates for that task, especially a motorcycle named "GhostRider" which zipped off the starting line and promptly ploughed straight into a metal obstacle. Most onlookers thought the bike's bid was over, until it unfurled two metal props and quickly righted itself to complete over half the course.

The favorites were even more impressive. Stanford University's entry, Stanley, is a Volkswagen Touareg sport utility vehicle outfitted with cameras, laser guidance systems, an inertial system that functions like an inner ear to keep the vehicle oriented, and six computers. It skipped through the course perfectly in less than 11 minutes, barely slowing for the cars and obstacles parked in its path.

A team from Cornell University was just behind, using a design based on a military all-terrain vehicle. Then there was last year's most promising competitor, Red Team from Carnegie Mellon University, which is fielding two Hummer-based vehicles this year with sophisticated laser radars to help the vehicles identify obstacles and choose alternative routes.

Computer scientist William Whittaker, who heads the team, says the technology has advanced so much over the past year that the prize will definitely be won.

"There's a sea change," Whittaker told the Pittsburgh Post. "Now, it's just a matter of which team's machines will be durable enough, smart enough and, frankly, lucky enough to win the prize. There's nothing shabby about any team that's in this thing."

Whittaker believes that the implications of the technologies being developed for the race go far beyond military uses.

"It will shift the world's view of what's viable," he said. "It's not just military vehicles that will take advantage of these technologies, but a wide variety of consumer and industrial products."
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