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."
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
HISTORIC: After the arrest of Kim Keon-hee on financial and political funding charges, the country has for the first time a former president and former first lady behind bars South Korean prosecutors yesterday raided the headquarters of the former party of jailed former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol to gather evidence in an election meddling case against his wife, a day after she was arrested on corruption and other charges. Former first lady Kim Keon-hee was arrested late on Tuesday on a range of charges including stock manipulation and corruption, prosecutors said. Her arrest came hours after the Seoul Central District Court reviewed prosecutors’ request for an arrest warrant against the 52-year-old. The court granted the warrant, citing the risk of tampering with evidence, after prosecutors submitted an 848-page opinion laying out
North Korean troops have started removing propaganda loudspeakers used to blare unsettling noises along the border, South Korea’s military said on Saturday, days after Seoul’s new administration dismantled ones on its side of the frontier. The two countries had already halted propaganda broadcasts along the demilitarized zone, Seoul’s military said in June after the election of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, who is seeking to ease tensions with Pyongyang. The South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Monday last week said it had begun removing loudspeakers from its side of the border as “a practical measure aimed at helping ease
DEADLY TASTE TEST: Erin Patterson tried to kill her estranged husband three times, police said in one of the major claims not heard during her initial trial Australia’s recently convicted mushroom murderer also tried to poison her husband with bolognese pasta and chicken korma curry, according to testimony aired yesterday after a suppression order lapsed. Home cook Erin Patterson was found guilty last month of murdering her husband’s parents and elderly aunt in 2023, lacing their beef Wellington lunch with lethal death cap mushrooms. A series of potentially damning allegations about Patterson’s behavior in the lead-up to the meal were withheld from the jury to give the mother-of-two a fair trial. Supreme Court Justice Christopher Beale yesterday rejected an application to keep these allegations secret. Patterson tried to kill her
RSS