How about watching a gaggle of driverless cars meander through a fake city?
The selection process for DARPA’s third Grand Challenge is almost over, and the final race begins bright and early on Saturday. So if you’re anywhere near Victorville, California, grab a cup of coffee and go watch autonomous robots careen wildly through the streets, jump curbs and morph into giant aliens that, as it turns out, are fighting a civil war that began in a galaxy far, far away…
Well, we can only hope that they’re not going to jump any curbs. The selected vehicles are driverless, and they are robots, and they have to follow laws and drive judiciously as they navigate through a simulated city scene. Why? For the thrill of the ride, of course, and the Department of Defense would like to use them on the battlefields of the future. The event is open to the public; you can look at the schedule here.
This is the third Grand Challenge sponsored by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an organization that organizes a lot of R&D for the Department of Defense. In 2005, a team from Stanford University won the $2 million prize with an autonomous Volkswagen Touareg named Stanley. The car, equipped with sophisticated LIDAR sensors that generated a three-dimensional map of the surrounding terrain, completed the 132-mile desert course in less than seven hours. Stanford’s entry in the 2007 competition, a Volkswagen Passat named Junior, has already been selected as a finalist.
You can read daily updates at either TG Daily or Wired.
Watch a video of a robot car colliding with a human car here.
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