A robotic car built by private university students backed by General Motors was crowned champion on Sunday of a race sponsored by US military officials intent on putting the technology to work on battlefields by 2015.
Engineering students from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania won a US$2 million prize for being rated the top finisher in a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) "Urban Challenge" held on Saturday.
In a race worthy of a science fiction film, Carnegie Mellon's "Tartan Racing Team" backed by automotive giant GM stuffed sensors, radar and other electronics into a Chevrolet Tahoe sport utility vehicle nicknamed "Boss."
"This competition has significantly advanced our understanding of what is needed to make driverless vehicles a reality," GM vice president of research and development Larry Burns said.
"Imagine being virtually chauffeured safely in your car while doing your e-mail, eating breakfast and watching the news. The technology in `Boss' is a stepping stone toward delivering this type of convenience," he said.
Boss and five other driverless vehicles maneuvered themselves 100km along mock city streets on a closed Southern California military base to a finish line within a six-hour time limit.
In the only contest of its kind in the world, robotic entries were driven to the starting line by team members who then abandoned the vehicles, which set out on their own. Competitors had to park, circle and properly react to traffic while completing "missions" that DARPA said simulate tasks vehicles might perform on battlefields.
The only traffic accident during the event was a minor fender-bender between entries from Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Eleven robotic cars and trucks began the race, and an additional 40 cars driven by people joined them to simulate city traffic.
Boss crossed the finish line in second place behind "Junior," a Volkswagen Passat modified by a team from Stanford University.
Speed was just one of the criteria used to determine the overall winner. DARPA judges took into account how precisely vehicles negotiated the route and obeyed traffic regulations.
The two previous DARPA challenges were across open desert.
Stanford's entry was awarded a second-place prize of US$1 million. Third place and US$500,000 went to a team from Virginia Tech. The US military hopes to be the real winner at the Challenge by fostering technology enabling it to make a third of its vehicles robotic by 2015.
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