DARPA Challenge Prize Money Restored 119
antispam_ben wrote to mention that, some three months later, DARPA has been able to find the money to offer cash prizes once again. The DARPA Urban Challenge will go forward next November with more than $3 Million on the line. From the article: "The race will see as many as 90 teams 'drive' an unmanned robotic road vehicle through city traffic, competing to finish a 60-mile course within six hours. Set for November 3 of next year, the challenge will call on robots to safely obey traffic laws, negotiate busy intersections, merge into moving traffic, avoid obstacles and navigate traffic circles. DARPA has yet to disclose the race location, but has said it will be in the western United States. The government research group didn't unveil the 2005 Grand Challenge location in the Mojave Desert until weeks before that race, in order to avoid giving any team an advantage."
Spooky (Score:5, Interesting)
Yay congress. (Score:3, Interesting)
But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.
No doubt the driving force behind this decision came from the folks at DARPA. First congress tells them to develop autonomous vehicles, then it proceeds to trip up their efforts with the "John Warner National Defense Authorization Act".
What I'd really like to know is why they're pushing this technology so hard and fast. Does it make sense to go straight to an urban environment when only four constestants even managed to finish the last challenge?
Re:Call me a cynic if you like... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hopefully less of the former and more of the latter, unless you're trying to travel through Canada to get there. NYC is only 2 degrees (~149mi) north of Sacramento. For comparison purposes, LA is 4 degrees (~312mi) south of Sac.
So what you (and just about everyone else, myself included) REALLY need is a map and/or some signs, rather than some supposed "inherent sense of direction" that you seem to believe we possess. What you believe you know (travel northeast) contradicts what you actually know (follow I80 until it turns into I90). And while you could probably get there following road signs, you'd be wise to consult an atlas along the way, and there's no reason a robot should be handicapped when that information is available to every other driver as well. Sure, it should have general rules to guide itself when information is lacking, but that's not always feasible, as evidenced by Mr. Kim this past week.
They must use perceptive powers to avoid colliding with other drivers or running down pedestrians and following the rules of the road instead of range finders and lasers and GPS-based speed limit adherance and other such nonsense.
Baby steps. You don't learn to drive on the freeway, and neither should "autonomous" vehicles. By the way, it's not the vehicles which are learning here -- it's their designers. We don't really want vehicles to run over people in order to learn that it's wrong. Radar (which is an acronym of Range and Finder, by the way) is an effective "perceptive power" for machines. It's fast and accurate, and Lexus uses it for distance sensing cruise control in many of their models.
Also there's no hyphen between fore and knowledge. It's just one word.