$2 Million on the Table for DARPA Urban Challenge

coondoggie writes "The contestants: Thirty-five driverless vehicles. The goal: to navigate an intricate faux-urban environment quickly. The prize: $2 million for the fastest qualifying vehicle. 'The National Qualification Event will take place this weekend ... DARPA says its third-annual Urban Challenge program has the lofty goal of developing technology that will keep soldiers off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles.'" I'll be cheering, as long as the creepy robot bear isn't participating.

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

The vehicle has to start in one piece, have a reasonable form factor (no 100ft periscopes!) and cannot eject any material other than exhaust. So no UAV's, bread crumb trails, oil slicks for your competitors, etc.

Re:solution

[Original Replica]

Most people these days don't understand the difference between Pedophilia and Ephebophila. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia [wikipedia.org] One is unnatural (doesn't make sense biologically), the other is simply culturally unacceptable. Back in the days when the average life expectancy was 40 years old, it made a lot of sense to marry a 14 year old. These days it makes more sense to have young teens continue their education and social development, consequentially our cultural perceptions of what is acceptable have changed.

Re:What about...

[David_Shultz]

Does the vehicle have to be one piece? Specifically can it launch a UAV to provide a top down view of the street? This could be then used to avoid crowds (or head towards them), get around dead ends, and generally navigate the cities. The imagery we have is often horribly out of date and roads have moved, stopped existing, or new ones have popped up.

Yes. All of the equipment has to be on the vehicle. As far as communication goes: GPS is allowed, and a remote kill switch is allowed (required, actually). Other than that, everything is on board. Typical fare is regular cameras (which have good distance vision, but require some smart computer vision algorithms) combined with laser range finders. The winner of the last DARPA challenge was a robot named Stanley (from Stanford) who mapped laser range finding data onto the video images, thus identifying the safe path in the image to travel through.