Bigger prizes than Wimbledon!
The $2 million first prize for this year's big unmanned-vehicle race, the DARPA Urban Challenge – held in Victorville, California last Saturday (November 3) – was won by Tartan Racing, one of two teams sponsored by CPU-giant Intel.
Second place - and $1 million - was taken by the Stanford Racing Team, also backed by Intel. Third place and a $500K prize went to Victor Tango.
The
DARPA Urban Challenge is the third in a series of Grand Challenge
events organised by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - the
central research and development body for the US Department of Defense.
The
Grand Challenge series came about because section 220 of the US
National Defense Act (2001) sets a goal for the armed forces to have
one-third of their operational ground-combat vehicles unmanned by 2015.
So
the decision-makers charged with reaching that goal came up with these
competitions, which have astonishingly lucrative cash prices.
In addition, 12 of the A-ranked teams each received $1 million
sponsorship directly from DARPA and many teams receive financial and
technical support from commercial organisations – on top of DARPA's
sponsorship or alone.
This year's challenge took place at the Southern California Logistics Airport – the former George air-force base - and was rather
different to the last event held in October 2005 at Primm, Nevada and
won by the Stanford Racing Team.
All that was required back then (if 'all' is the right word) was for vehicles to navigate a 132-mile desert course in less than 10 hours. For 2007, though, the race was made considerably harder.
Vehicles had to complete
three different missions, each involving about 20 miles of driving
mixed in with live traffic consisting of 50 cars! Harder still, the unmanned vehicles had to do this in a mock urban environment.
According
to Dr Norman Whitaker, Urban Challenge Program Manager, 'Vehicles
competing in the Urban Challenge have to think like human drivers
and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles,
including robotic vehicles without drivers, and operate safely on the
course. The urban setting adds considerable complexity to the challenge
faced by the robotic vehicles and replicates the environments where
many of today's military missions are conducted.'
The
total distance for all three of this year's missions - around 60 miles
– had to be completed in less than six hours and the driving had to be
up to the standard required by the California Driver's Handbook,
California's equivalent of the UK Highway code.
