DARPA 2005 in gear for rocky racing

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 7 Oct 2005 at 14:19

The desert and mountains near Primm, Nevada are the setting this weekend for the robotic racing of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

A prize of $2m awaits the team whose automated vehicle manages the entire course the fastest, although it must be in under 10 hours, because that's when the judges go home.

The 23 finalists - there have been pre-qualifying rounds - have to traverse a rugged course that features lakebeds, narrow desert roads, tight turns, tunnels, gateways and what are promised as 'treacherous mountain passes'.

To make things even harder, the exact course will not be revealed to the teams until two hours before the event begins, 6:30 a.m on Saturday.

Via and Intel are among those sponsoring the competitors (AMD has chosen to shower its favours instead on US Stock Car racing). Via is sponsoring the Team Jefferson with its VIA EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard-based vehicle, 'Tommy', while Intel is hedging its bets with both Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team and Stanford Univeristy's Racing Team, backed by Pentium M processors.

This is the second year of the autonomous vehicle race, following the rather inglorious inauguration in 2004, where none of the entrants completed the circuit. But this has already been bettered in the qualifying stages where the vehicle Mojavaton completed the entire track without having seen the course before.

You can read more about the race at www.grandchallenge.org.

But behind all the fun and games, however, lies the hidden hand of the military-industrial complex. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense set up the Grand Challenge to accelerate research and development into autonomous ground vehicle technology that could be used on battlefields.