DARPA Grand Challenge 3

Meostro writes "DARPA announced the 3rd "Grand Challenge" today, The DARPA Urban Challenge. "To succeed, vehicles must autonomously obey traffic laws while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles." This year's new twist is two tracks for entry: the first is the same as the previous two challenges (develop on your own without Gov't. funding), but the second involves "submitting a detailed proposal for up to $1 million of technology development funds." Here is the PDF press release ."

My Dissapointment in accuracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is likely that DARPA has become incapable of inovation because of internal politics so they need to attract new ideas from the out side."

Um, Darpa is a think tank. They don't do actual research. It's been that way since the beginning.

Re:My Dissapointment in DARPA

[odyaws]

As a tax paying citizen of the United States, it sure is frustrating to try to find the results of DARPA research.

Yes, they do research in defense but shouldn't there be a little more than a tiny graphic or blurb about what work they're doing? Couldn't they at least take the time to write an abstract or 1-2 page paper with unclassified information on each project?

Try instead going to Google Scholar or another academic index and searching on the titles for various DARPA projects. Having worked on several DARPA-funded projects, I can tell you that there is generally a significant emphasis on publishing results. DARPA-sponsored work probably results in dozens or hundreds of articles in scientific journals a year, all of which are available to the public.

When you say your alma mater "has produced better papers in these fields" you should have a look at the acknowledgements section of these papers. Chances are pretty good many of them will have a statement like "This work funded in part by DARPA (or NSF, etc) grant number XXX."

Re:My Dissapointment in DARPA

[EEJD]

That IS their job. DARPA doesn't do any real research. They fund research projects at schools and in private industry.

Re:My Dissapointment in DARPA

[odyaws]

It is likely that DARPA has become incapable of inovation because of internal politics so they need to attract new ideas from the out side.

DARPA is a funding agency, not a research institution. They actually have very few employees, who are mostly there to identify promising research areas and allocate money to invest in them. The actual research is done by academic and industrial research groups. Incidentally, many if not all of the DARPA project managers are actually very good research scientists and engineers who take 1-3 years away from their normal work to work for DARPA, not career bureaucrats (wow, that's a hard word to spell) mired in politics. Most of them really view it as an important public service.

Re:readiness?

[lbrandy]

Are they going to give the robots the GPS location of all the stop signs and traffic circles? If they do, how well would this apply to a city where not all GPS locations are known? If not, how will it differentiate signs from one another and from random stuff in the background?

The point of these challenges isn't to set one-year goals. An urban enviornment sets up a hugely more complicated affair that will requires years of failure before success. The complexity of the task goes up an order of magnitude.. however you are definitely hung up on the wrong problems. Signs occur at predictable locations, move in predictable ways, have predictable shapes, and use predictable colors. Someone with an introductory graduate course in computer vision could write a "sign" detector that is pretty robust.

Re:Hardly fair...

[osgeek]

I'd rather they do it the hard way. Sure, it would make for an easier contest to have the cars communicate with each other; but if the goal here is to one day actually use this technology in the real world, how many kids on bicycles will have communication radios built into their bikes?

Re:Whilst I understand....

[Cais]

If you read the RTFPR, there's a little blurb at the bottom that explains:

ABOUT THE DARPA GRAND CHALLENGE DARPA has sponsored two previous Grand Challenge competitions. The first was held in March 2004 and featured a 142-mile desert course. Fifteen autonomous ground vehicles attempted the course and no vehicle finished. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, four autonomous vehicles successfully completed a 132-mile desert route under the required 10-hour limit, and DARPA awarded a $2 million prize to "Stanley" from Stanford University. The November 2007 Urban Challenge will feature autonomous ground vehicles executing simulated military supply missions safely and effectively while in a mock city environment, merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles.

Re:Too early to go Urban.

[Animats]

That's exactly right. I ran one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot [overbot.com], and we made it to the NQE. It's clear where DARPA is going, and they're getting there faster than they expected. There were 43 autonomous vehicles at the NQE, and all of them more or less worked. Five finished the course, and most of the 23 that started the course probably could have finished with minor improvements. This is way ahead of anything previously seen in robotics.

The big challenge this time is that now real situational awareness is required. Much better sensing will be needed. There are some new technologies out there that can probably do the job. Last year's sensing systems were actually rather marginal.

Here's the formal solicitation from DARPA [fbo.gov], which has more details. Basically, DARPA will provide a "road map", as a file, which indicates all the streets and stop signs. (Traffic light sensing is not required). Then, just before the start, DARPA will provide a "mission file", which specifies the start point, checkpoints to be passed, and the goal. Vehicles must be able to park, unpark, do a 3-point turn, discover that a route is blocked and switch to another route, and merge into traffic. The goals are ambitious, but I expect they'll be achieved within two cycles of this Grand Challenge.

As for applications, Dr. Tether said at the last GC that he now expects to field some of this technology within five years. I expect to see some automated driving for convoy vehicles deployed. The whole convoy might not be autonomous, but autonomous vehicles that can intelligently follow a lead vehicle will be very useful. The escort troops will be in something with armor and firepower, like a Bradley, while the trucks trail along behind. This will be popular with the guys whose current job description is "target".

Re:My Dissapointment in DARPA

[Tiger4]

"The fact that this contest isn't run in a more open way makes it seems like less of a "contest" and more of a "do our research for us!" kind of thing."

Well, yes.

This ISN'T about open technologies, this is about building up to a defense (warmaking) capability.

On the one hand, you have to release a tiny bit of information, just so all the competitors have the same basic assumptions and stay in the same universe of solutions. On the other hand, you don't want to constrain the competitors too much with regard to what to pick and choose from.

And, on the Gripping Hand (or end effector as they say in the trade), you don't want to reveal too much of what you do and don't know to be possible. It is one thing to say you researched Quantum Computing. It is another to say you now know it can't handle more than 16 bit precision faster than 25MHz. You may now realize Quantum is a waste of time, but there is no reason to let your adversaries know that too. Let them waste their time and effort and money, while you move on to more profitable things. Or conversely and contrariwise, maybe you have screwed up and they will make the breakthrough you missed (think German Heavy water experiments). Again, let them work while you watch.

Publishing results is counterproductive in the most important race DARPA cares about, the arms race. They only let you know what you need to know.