Inside DARPA's Robot Race

Belfegor writes "The PBS series Nova has a great feature on their website, regarding the coverage of the DARPA-sponsored 'Robot Race' in which driverless vehicles 'competed' in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. The full show is available on the website, and besides that they have plenty more information about the robotics behind the challenge, and also some pretty cool out-takes from the show."

My Robot

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have entered a giant mechanical penis shaped robot car with "Kill all humans" written on the sides.

Too bad I've been so busy slacking this year.

Great show but...Patents bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And, then, who owns the work? Do they at least get patent recognition on some of the innovations? Some of the software they talked about was truly seriously cool stuff."

But, but. Software patents are bad. Now I'm confused.

Re:I'm a geek, so I watched this twice last night.

[Zocalo]

There were two vehicles that had different strategies (the tortoise and the hair)

Let me guess; in the end it was a close shave and the tortoise only won by a whisker? ;)

Haven't I seen this before...?

[TriZz]

...the Knight Rider prophacy is coming true!

Note to David Hasselhoff: Now's the time to re-invest into your (American) acting career!!

Agressive Robot Drivers

[digitaldc]

What do you do in the future when one of these is mass-produced and forgets its turn signal and cuts you off?
Do you scream and give it the finger?
Throw rocks at it?
Run it off the road?
Launch a homing missile at it?
Any way around it, driverless vehicles will have no rights in our future society!
Who will speak up for the robots?

Re:Stanford 0wn3d Carnegie

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, using "0wn3d" at all was so 1997

1997? Hell, that term has been in use since 1337!

Robot Wars

[s31523]

At what point do the robots turn on each other and try to smash one another with saws, hammers and spikes? Wait, I think that is a different show...