Robocars rev-up in Californian race

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 5 Nov 2007 at 09:07

A driverless car created by Carnegie Mellon university has scooped the top prize in a contest designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to inspire the development of automated vehicles.

The car, nicknamed Boss, was competing with 10 other automated vehicles and was required to traverse a ghost town in the Californian desert.

The cars had to deal with single and dual carriageways, traffic lights, junctions, navigate car parks and avoid buildings. Alongside the 11 competitors, 30 vehicles driven by professional drivers were employed to simulate traffic.

Boss, a modified Chevy Tahoe SUV, averaged around 14 miles per hour and completed the sixty mile course 20 minutes ahead of the second placed vehicle from Stanford. It was one of only six vehicles to finish the course, with the others pulling out through mishap including one interesting collision which saw a dump truck called TerraMax try and park in a shop.

DARPA is hoping competitions such as these will one day lead to automated supply trucks in combat, reducing the number of soldiers that need to be sent onto the battlefield.

The Carnegie Mellon team was awarded $2 million for its success, second-placed finisher Stanford received $1 million, while Virginia Tech's Victor Tango team finished third and received $500,000.

The robots entered by teams from the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and MIT also finished the race, though Cornell and MIT both exceeded the six-hour time limit set by DARPA.

"Robots sometimes stun the world, inspire a lot of people and change the belief of what is possible," says William Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor and team leader. "We've seen that here and once the perception of what's possible changes it never goes back. This is a phenomenal thing for robotics."

"This is really a fantastic accomplishment," adds DARPA Director Tony Tether. "I watched these things driving and I forgot after awhile that there was nobody in there."