DARPA Grand Challenge

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a United States government-sponsored competition that aims to create the first fully autonomous vehicles capable of competing on an under-300 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert in the Southwest. This annual challenge took place for the first time on March 13, 2004 and was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. In the first year of the event, none of the robot vehicles came even close to meeting the challenge. Future holdings of the competition, however, are expected to include improved results by the competitors.

This was the first such distance competition in the United States; to date, there have been other competitions for semi-autonomous vehicles, but none on the scale of the Grand Challenge. The U.S. Department of Defense has permitted DARPA to offer prize money ($1 million) to facilitate robotic development, with the ultimate goal of making one of three ground military forces automated by 2015. Following the 2004 event, Dr. Tony Tether, the director of DARPA, announced that the prize money had been increased to $2 million for the next event, which is scheduled for October 8, 2005.

The competition is open to all U.S. citizens and organizations, including high school and college students, businesses and other organizations. More than 100 teams registered in the first year, bringing a wide variety of technological skills to the race.

Contents

1 Rules 2 2004 Grand Challenge 2.1 Preliminary tests 2.2 The event 2.3 The results 3 Related articles 4 External links 4.1 Official Sites 4.2 Articles, Photo Sites 4.3 Team Sites

Rules

• The vehicle must travel autonomously on the ground in under ten hours.
• The vehicle must stay within the course boundaries as defined by a data file provided by DARPA.
• The vehicle may use GPS and other public signals.
• No control commands may be sent to the vehicle while en route.
• The vehicle must not intentionally touch any other competing vehicle.
• An autonomous service station is permitted at a checkpoint area approximately halfway between start and finish.

DARPA is conducting this challenge in association with SCORE International Off-Road Racing.

2004 Grand Challenge

The 2004 Grand Challenge was held in the Mojave Desert along a 150-mile route that follows along the path of Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California-Nevada border in Primm.

Preliminary tests

Prior to the main event in the Mojave Desert, the teams were required to navigate a mile-long obstacle course at California Speedway. Three teams were able to successfully complete the entire course, while three more almost completed it and another half dozen teams completed a portion of the course. After it became clear that the challenge may be over before it even began (with the high failure rate as the teams worked the kinks out of their vehicles), DARPA decided to scrap the initial tests and allow fifteen of the teams to run the race anyway, in the hopes that the many mechanical problems experienced by the teams would be sorted out prior to the main event.

The event

Unfortunately, the failures of the vehicles during the preliminary tests were indicative of how the vehicles would perform on the actual course. Only three hours into the event, a mere four vehicles remained operational. The vehicles that failed suffered from a variety of mechanical problems: "stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment."

Within a few hours, all of the vehicles in the challenge had suffered critical vehicle failures, had been disqualified or had withdrawn. The furthest any of the teams had gotten was the Red Team's 7.4 miles, less than 5% off the full length of the course (the vehicle went off-course in the tightest hairpin turn and got stuck on the embankment). The next furthest vehicles were those of the SciAutonics II Team, which traversed 6.7 miles before becoming stuck on an embankment, Digital Auto Drive, which drove 6.0 miles before getting stuck on a rock, and the Golem Group, which made it 5.2 miles before getting trapped on a steep hill.

The results

Although the initial race was deemed a failure due to no vehicles even achieving anything close to the goal, DARPA has committed to running the challenge again for as long as Congressional authority allows (which currently runs to 2007, but can be extended).

The first Grand Challenge is considered by some to be a success in any event, merely on the basis that it has spurred interest and innovation. The requisite logic dictates that, as long as overall forward progress is being made, the program is a success.

In addition to the difficulty many vehicles had with the harsh terrain, a critical problem many initial designs had concerned the inability to handle two distinct problems simultaneously: sensing upcoming obstacles and following the GPS waypoints. DARPA Grand Challenge deputy program manager Tom Strat said, "some of the vehicles were able to follow the GPS waypoints very accurately; but were not able to sense obstacles ahead....Other vehicles were very good at sensing obstacles, but had difficulty following waypoints or were scared of their own shadow, hallucinating obstacles when they weren't there."

Several teams have announced plans to return again in the years to come, taking the lessons that they learned from the 2004 event and applying them to future designs.

Related articles

• NASA Centennial Challenges

External links

Official Sites

• The home page of the DARPA Grand Challenge (http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge)
• DGC-2005 Team Application Status (http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/TeamInfo.html)
• DGC-2004 Teams (http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge04/teams.htm)
• Grand Challenge Tracking page (http://www.grandchallenge.org/)

Articles, Photo Sites

• The Register: Final robot grunts picked for $1million DARPA race (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/36231.html)
• The Register: DARPA's Grand Challenge proves to be too grand (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/36234.html)
• CNN.com: Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge (http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/03/14/darpa.race)
• SFGate.com: Robot race suffers quick, ignoble end (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/03/14/ROBOT.TMP)
• DARPA Grand Challenge Image Gallery (http://hobbiton.thisside.net/darpa/)
• DARPA Grand Challenge in Spanish (http://www.roboticspot.com/spot/especial/darpa2004/)

Team Sites

• Autonomous Vehicle Engineers (Team AVE) (http://www.avengi.com)
• Autonomous Vehicle Systems (http://www.autonvs.com)
• Team RAV (http://www.ravllc.com)
• A.I. Motorvators (http://www.aimotorvators.com)
• Armani (http://www.armaniproject.com)
• Axion Racing (http://www.axionracing.com)
• Blue Team (http://www.ghostriderrobot.com)
• Cornell DARPA Team (http://dgc.cornell.edu)
• CyberRider (http://www.cyberrider.org)
• FutureNova (http://www.pontifier.com/darpa/)
• Grand Challenge Autonomous Race Team (http://gcart.rit.edu)
• The Golem Group (http://www.golemgroup.com/)
• Maximum Exposure (http://www.horizonclub.net/racee1.html)
• Mech I.Q. (http://www.mechiq.com)
• The Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors home page (http://pvrw.com)
• The Prodigies (http://www.teamprodigies.com)
• Red Team (http://www.redteamracing.org)
• Red Team Too (http://www.redteamracing.org)
• ROVER SYSTEMS (http://www.roversystems.com)
• Stanford Racing Team (http://www.stanfordracing.org)
• SciAutonics (http://www.sciautonics.com)
• SciAutonics II (http://www.sciautonics.com)
• Team 1010Delta (http://www.videoptions.com/Darpapage.htm)
• Team Aggie Spirit - UC Davis (http://www.teamaggiespirit.com/)
• Team Arctic Tortoise (http://www.gi.alaska.edu/DGC)
• Team AV Andrea Morgan (http://aimagic.org)
• Team AV Sydney Bristow (http://aimagic.org)
• Team AV Wendy Darling (http://aimagic.org)
• Team CajunBot (http://www.cajunbot.com/)
• Team Tormenta (http://www.teamtormenta.com)
• Team Cal Poly (http://www.ee.calpoly.edu/telab/gc2005/)
• Team Caltech (http://team.caltech.edu)
• Team CIMAR (http://cimar.mae.ufl.edu/grand_challenge/)
• Team ENSCO (http://www.ensco.com)
• Team Go It Alone (http://home.netcom.com/~aimo)
• Team LoGHIQ (http://www.cabecomposites.com/team.html)
• Team Overbot (http://www.overbot.com)
• Team Rambo (http://www.taylortechnology.com/darpa/index.asp)
• Team Remote-I (http://www.remotei.com/dgc)
• Team South Carolina (http://www.ewm.biz/grandchallenge.htm)
• Team Visionary Endeavor -- Fox Valley Technical College (http://dept.fvtc.edu/darpa/)
• Team XAR (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~darpagc/live/)
• Viva Las Vegas (http://robotic.darktech.org)

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