Fifteen robot vehicles took off across the Mojave Desert starting at dawn on Saturday, dodging boulders and tortoises in search of a place in scientific history and US$1 million in Pentagon cash.
The 228km race over some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's own skunk works that spawned the Internet, the Predator drone and the stealth fighter.
The top qualifier, Red Team Sandstorm, sped out of the starting line at the SlashX ranch, south of Barstow, to the cheers of several thousand spectators, and quickly reached speeds of 32km an hour. Other vehicles followed at five-minute intervals.
PHOTO: EPA
Within an hour, however, the course began to take its toll. Sandstorm, based on an Army surplus Humvee and put together at the robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, was the first casualty, as it veered off course down an embankment. When Sandstorm returned to the course, it burned out a mechanical part.
Shortly afterward, David, the entry from Ensco Incorporated in Falls Church, Virginia, struck a bush and rolled over. The Acura MDX entry from Palos Verdes High School in California failed to make a turn at the start, ran directly into a barrier and was out of the race.
Less than four hours after the race began, all vehicles had either crashed or been demobilized. The most successful robot belonged to the team SciAutomics, based in Thousand Oaks, California. The team was sponsored by Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of off-road vehicles. The SciAutomics vehicle managed to go 12.8km.
No one won the cash prize, which required finishing the course within 10 hours.
The competition, announced a little over a year ago, gave birth to some of the strangest contraptions ever built: computer-laden mechanical monstrosities that began life as golf carts, dune buggies, hybrids, luxury sports utility vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, a motorcycle and a 16-ton military truck.
They went by the names Terrahawk and TerraMax, Ghost Rider and Doom Buggy, Golem and Ladibug, Cliff and Bob. The rules required the vehicles to traverse the difficult course without human intervention. These were meant to be true autonomous vehicles, not remotely piloted machines or drive-by-wire craft like the Predator.
The Pentagon is trying to meet a congressional mandate to convert a third of its battlefield vehicles to autonomous operation by 2015 to save soldiers' lives.
Major military contractors and computer companies backed some of the teams, but others had only their children's inheritances and hundreds of hours of sweat equity behind them.
The trials last week gave a preview of what was to come on Saturday. Some machines would not start, and some drove in circles like dogs chasing their tails.
The only motorcycle wobbled 9m and flopped on its side. The driverless vehicles routinely ran over warning cones and slammed into concrete barriers and vehicles that had been placed along the course as obstacles. Even the most perfect trial ended its run by knocking into a barrier it was supposed to sense and avoid.
The race attracted an assortment of dreamers, hucksters and high school hackers, off-road racers and BattleBot warriors, crackpots and visionaries.
The project manager for DARPA is a straight-arrow Air Force colonel, but the contestants "are a marriage of the geeks and the greaseballs," as one of the organizers put it.
The teams devoted the better part of a year and spent US$10,000 to US$3.5 million to produce their entries. For most contestants, the prize money was a small part of the incentive.
"I don't think the money is the motivation," said Anthony Tether, DARPA's director. "It has sparked an interest in science and technology in this country that we haven't seen since the 1960s with the Apollo program."
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the