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 ."

readiness?

[PresidentEnder]

"Grand Challenge 2005 proved that autonomous ground vehicles can travel significant distances and reach their destination, just as you or I would drive from one city to the next," said DARPA Director Dr. Tony Tether. "After the success of this event, we believe the robotics community is ready to tackle vehicle operation inside city limits."

I'm not going to speculate as to whether the robotics community is "ready" for this challenge, but what do the two challenges have to do with each other from a technical standpoint? In the previous challenges, vision wasn't good enough to tell a boulder from a bush. 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?

I'll be impressed with no crashing into each other, before they worry about compliance with all traffic laws. How will the robots recognize the speed limit in their area, or will they all crawl along at 10 mph, impeding the flow of traffic?

The real reason they're doing this.

[wiredog]

Bagdad. Unmanned Military Ground Vehicles. Primarily for supply runs, but could also be used to troll for IEDs.

Re:Hardly fair...

[MindStalker]

Because if your follow the basic rules of the road (and have cameras at all blind spots) these things are easy. What concerns me is that this being a challenge teams won't work together which means that the cars will not have a universal set of rules for communicating, something really essential in autonomous cars.
(IE a radio network in which cars can say, I'm turning left, or I'm about to change into the left lane) Sure these cars will have blinkers as well, but that hugely ineffective compared to the preformace you get can when the cars can communicate.

Public Transit, anyone?

[ax2groin]

Why is it that every time I hear a story about efforts to improve vehicles, I say to myself, "Gee, hasn't that been done already?" All these efforts seem to have one thing in mind: get a car to act like a train, that way we can continue subsidising the auto/oil/rubber industries with the needless purchase of more individual rail cars.

How about a challenge to develop real public transit in the U.S.?

Sorry, I live in L.A. and I'm bitter.