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Desert Robot Race Update, With Video

Posted by timothy on Sun Sep 07, 2003 09:35 PM
from the mmm-mpeg dept.
The Almighty Buck United States Science Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Several teams have moved forward with their bid to run the Barstow-Vegas Desert Robot Race (For those not familiar check out http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge ). As of today 55 teams are registered, some of the most interesting are Cal Tech, AI Magic, and the Red Team out of Carnegie Mellon. Also fishing around the Red Team site, there is a pretty nifty video."
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  • Yet another interesting project with a lot of geek value which will eventually be used to kill people by remote control...

    Sucks.

    • Re:Interesting project which will kill a lot of fo (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Would you prefer they just drop a 5,000lb bomb instead? A side effect of more efficient mechanisms for killing is that there are less inadvertant civilian casualties. Just compare the fire bombings of Dresden to the wars in Kosovo and Iraq. Which method do you prefer?
      • Would you prefer they just drop a 5,000lb bomb instead? A side effect of more efficient mechanisms for killing is that there are less inadvertant civilian casualties. Just compare the fire bombings of Dresden to the wars in Kosovo and Iraq. Which method do you prefer?

        I would prefer it be very difficult to kill people in general. That way, we'd only do it when we really needed to.

        If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side

        • If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side of history results -- genocide, oppression, etc. Just because it's your side that happens to have the better guns, tech, germs or whatever doesn't mean it's a Good Thing.

          Don't you mean anytime one side's leaders?

          Or, put another way, it's easier to be yelling "Bring it on" when you're half a world away from the battlefield. One of the big changes in modern warfare is that wars a

        • 70% of Americans believe Iraq sponsored 9-11

          Please tell me you pulled that number out of your arse. If you didn't, I think American commonsense has surrendered.

        • Re:Interesting project which will kill a lot of fo (Score:4, Insightful)

          by boomgopher (627124) on Sunday September 07 2003, @11:50PM (#6897423) Journal
          I just don't think that most geeks would want to be a part of it if they really thought it over, which is why I said what I did.

          Well yeah, and North Korea is probably using Linux to track which 'anti-revolutionaries' and their families to kill or lock up in concentration camps.
          So should we stop coding? That's the world we live in man.


        • I would prefer it be very difficult to kill people in general. That way, we'd only do it when we really needed to.

          Everyone prefers not to kill (except the murderous bastards). This is a straw-man position, and politically naive.

          If you look at history, anytime one side was able to kill the other without having to really risk themselves, the shitty side of history results -- genocide, oppression, etc. Just because it's your side that happens to have the better guns, tech, germs or whatever doesn't mean it's a Good Thing.

          No, if you look at history, shitty things happen all the time. There is evidence to the contrary: when forces are balanced, then only the tension builds, not the solution (eventually the tension breaks with very bad results: UK-DE before WWI, US-JP before WWII, UK-FR 100 years war, GR-Persia...). The only time peace occurs is when overwhelming force exists on one side (the benevolent side).

          Hell, look at us: We've been way out ahead for, what, 20 years now and already we're invading other nations so our political leaders can distract the masses from economic problems or the fact that they can't stop terrorism (70% of Americans believe Iraq sponsored 9-11, and why not? They're ay-rabs, ain't they?).

          How does political trolling like this get modded up to +5?

          Anyhow, I understand that we live in reality and that these things happen. I just don't think that most geeks would want to be a part of it if they really thought it over, which is why I said what I did.

          "Most geeks" is a spurious term. If you think they are all left-leaning pinkos, you`re wrong. If you think they`re Edvard Teller madmen, you`re wrong. Geeks are all over the spectrum. I would imagine there are some geeks who lost their brothers/fathers/sisters/mothers in 9-11, and would have no qualms in putting the hurt on some goat-farking terrorist camp via remote control.
          • Everyone prefers not to kill (except the murderous bastards). This is a straw-man position, and politically naive.

            It's not a straw-man position. We kill people all the time because it's easy to do. Do you think that George Bush Jr. would have invaded Iraq if there was going to be a 1:1 casualty rate, or even a 1:5 or 1:10? Of course not -- the whole point of the Iraq war was to distract the nation from the fact that we've lost more jobs than under any President since Hoover and, at the same time, make it

            • Explain me a link between 9/11 and Iraq. Bush keeps referring to it, yet there's no link whatsoever!

              There may be no direct link, but that`s not the direct point (IMHO). The logic behind it (for me) is as follows:
              1. Terrorism, based on fundamentalist extremism, will always exist in certain people`s hearts
              2. That terrorism is limited to goofballs bombing a volkswagen or `small scale` incidents unless they receive major funding, logistical support, intel, and backing
              3. Certain states, with abolute dictatorial

  • Torrent (Score:4, Informative)

    by Aliencow (653119) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:42PM (#6896877) Homepage Journal
    I am currently downloading the file (it's slowing down every second..) but would anyone be willing to provide a tracker ? I'll make a .torrent and email it/seed it !

  • race vs challenge (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:45PM (#6896899)
    from the darpa site's Q&A : "...And they must do these things quickly- overall speed will be the deciding factor and the time limit is designed to push vehicle speeds far beyond current technologies."

    this makes it seem like the focus is more on speed that on being able to navigate by oneself. if you're making a race, call it a race, dont call it a challenge, a challenge should have prizes for anyone who can do it. i find this very misleading, anyone have any thoughts on this? how about starting a petition to change the name!

    consolevision roxors

    • the challenge is high-speed automated navigation.

      As a news.com story pointed out, "Calculations and decisions have to be made rapidly, however, and the room for error is huge. A vehicle moving at 45 miles per hour is covering about 60 feet per second ... If the vehicle's computer can't absorb changes in data quickly enough, it could mean a trip into a gully."

      Solving a problem, and solving the same problem in an efficient and timely matter are two different things. As any student walking out of a final

  • Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pvt_Waldo (459439) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:47PM (#6896911)
    One of the huge applications of autonomous vehicles is the removal of landmines. Systems that can scout out, identify, mark, and even remove mines could save the death and maiming of thousands every year.

    Our poor earth is littered with millions of land mines left over from past conflicts, and from current ones too.

    Don't knock technology like this. It can be used for good too. Even to clean up after the bad.

    • Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Skyshadow (508) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:53PM (#6896949) Homepage
      Or you could have it roll into a network of caves and shoot the people inside without exposing your own guys to risk.

      Or you could send it over to an enemy location and transmit a "bomb me" signal to the smart bombs to hit.

      Or you could have it crawl in and set fire to a compound where a bunch of religious extremists are held up.

      Or you could use it to wait in a ditch for a month until the car of a political leader rolls by and blow it up.

      These aren't all necessarily *bad* things -- it's always been reality that we kill each other, sometimes with good reason. But it *is* another step away from the old days when you'd have to risk your own life to kill another person, which IMO makes it a lot easier to do.

      • You're very right, this can be used for much "bad".

        That's why I'm here pushing the idea of using it for good. Nobody's stopping anyone from developing this kind of technology for useful non-threatening/harming uses.

        It's not a sword, it's not a plowshare, it's just a thing that you can use for different purposes.
    • This has nothing to do with scouting out landmines. These robots have to follow a set path of waypoints. When you scout out landmines there aren't many waypoints cause you don't know where the landmines are. You could set a robot to travel a path in a field looking for landmines along the way but there are probably much better and easier ways to do it.

      Beside's you'd probably want some kind of human interaction, what happens if the vehicle comes across a land mind, doesn't "see" it and blows up? At leas

    • Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pvt_Waldo (459439) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:59PM (#6896981)
      Here are some stats from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines website at http:///www.icbl.org and the Clear Landmines website at http://www.clearlandmines.com...
      1. Over 35,000 amputees in Camboida alone from landmine injuries
      2. An estimated 200 million landmines have been manufactured in the last 25 years.
      3. Each year, 26,000 people are killed or mutilated by landmines of which 8,000 are children.
      4. Roughly 3 people every hour, 71 per day are injured or killed by landmines


      The US Military DOES put effort into this kind of thing for landmine detection. It's not just a "killing" technology. Check out http://www.aro.army.mil/arowash/rt/sbir/00PHIII/00 page3.htm for example. Cool "geek friendly" vehicle which can save lives. There are others too. Go to google and search for sbir landmine detection [google.com]. SBIR grants are a type of grant the US goverment (all branches, not just military) give out every year to small businesses to develop stuff.
      • Of course the linked sites also point out that the US and Russia are the only members of the G8 who haven't stopped producing/using mines. Rather than spend $billions inventing some crazy robot buggy to clear up your mess, how about just not dropping it in the first place? Or is that too simple?

    • Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:5, Funny)

      by dreadnougat (682974) on Sunday September 07 2003, @10:19PM (#6897064)
      Or you could use trained monkeys to do the same thing. This accomplishes two things: 1) Saves lives by clearing out dangerous landmine and other unexploded ordinance. 2) Pisses off PETA Well I don't know about you, but I'm off to kill a cute animal to make into a bag.
    • Bullshit. You don't need long distance autonomy to remove landmines. You need simple low cost items that can be maintained and operated by simple folks in the third-world countries. 50 metres remote control distance is enough.

    • One of the huge applications of autonomous vehicles is the removal of landmines.

      As has already been pointed out, that's unnecessarily complex compared to telepresence used to do the same. In fact, I'm suspicious that this can be used by the military for much (general) good at all. Think about the environment that makes this necessary. If it was NASA, it might make sense, but where on the surface of this planet do you need a machine to operate itself rather than a human operating it remotely?

  • Sounds like a job for (Score:4, Funny)

    by euxneks (516538) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:52PM (#6896947)
    Monster Garage! [origprod.com]

  • CNET had a story on this a while back (Score:5, Informative)

    by tessaiga (697968) on Sunday September 07 2003, @09:57PM (#6896971)

    News.com covered the Grand Challenge a while back in one of their articles [com.com]. Gives a more viewer-friendly overview of what it's all about than DARPA's site.

  • i think i will enter (Score:5, Funny)

    by kdb003 (705035) on Sunday September 07 2003, @10:00PM (#6896988) Homepage Journal
    i will simply program it to set off an emp.
    that should spice things up
  • I checked out Red Teams site and all I can say is "wow".

    That and Mopar never gave me these options [redteamracing.org] when I bought my Jeep! :(

  • Red Team Movie Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by jgaynor (205453) <<jon> <at> <gaynor.org>> on Sunday September 07 2003, @10:11PM (#6897031) Homepage
    Here [rutgers.edu], Courtesy of Rutgers.
    • Shucks, I was getting it from the original site at a good rate (~30KB/s) and they just erased the file (disconnected, then 404 on retry). Which I think means we made some poor geek's pager go off on a Sunday evening.
  • Did they mean dessert robot race? My entry will be CowboyNealBot.

  • CMU Mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by Rufus211 (221883) <rufus-slashdot@h ... g ['h.o' in gap]> on Sunday September 07 2003, @10:20PM (#6897069) Homepage
    Wow, this is the second CMU site taken down in the last few days. Well, lets see if we can take down an other! Here's a mirror of the movie and some documents on my CMU account:

    http://andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/www.redteamracing.o rg/ [cmu.edu]

  • the mpeg - my first slashdotting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Mockingbird (51545) on Sunday September 07 2003, @10:51PM (#6897209) Homepage
    So I get a call from one of my client's ISPs. Some guy named Charles is really alarmed about the massive amount of traffic my sleepy little robot site is generating all of a sudden.

    Woohoo, my first Slashdotting!

    So naturally the ISP temporarily banished the file. Thanks to everyone who put up mirrors. The file ought to be back where it belongs on 9/10.

    Unrelated to the file, these guys at CMU kick ass. Despite all the DARPA downplaying that they don't exepect anyone to even complete the race in the first year, I have tremendous confidence in the Red Team to overachieve. There's a 'success at any cost' vibe coming out of that place that has to be experienced to be believed.
    • There's a 'success at any cost' vibe coming out of that place that has to be experienced to be believed.

      Yes, in fact, many teams are spending much more than a million bucks to try and win. It's exciting.

      • The ISP is cfx hosting. They specialize in ColdFusion solutions.

        Actually I'm pretty pleased with the way they handled the incident. Our contract doesn't allow for unlimited bandwidth - they could easily have let the traffic flow and charged us an arm and a leg for it.

        Further, once they decided to intervene, they could have done a lot worse than just dumping the file - I imagine most ISPs would have just shut stopped the whole site.

        Finally, even at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night, I got a courtesy call about

  • MIRROR (Score:3, Informative)

    by BhAaD (692949) on Sunday September 07 2003, @11:16PM (#6897311) Homepage
    Here is a link: http://sch5.digitalnines.com/red_team.mpeg

  • The Red Whittaker hype machine (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats (122034) on Sunday September 07 2003, @11:42PM (#6897388) Homepage
    There's heavy hype out of Red Whittaker's group. He wants to build a machine from the ground up, needs $5 million to do it, and doesn't have it. The fancy video is a fund-raising effort. Note that nothing in that video shows work done for the Grand Challenge, other than some pretty design pictures on a screen.

    That red Jeep has nothing to do with the Grand Challenge. That's Navlab 11 [navlab.org], the Robotics Institute's latest test vehicle. the Robotics Institute, headed by Charles Thorpe, took a look at the Grand Challenge and decided to pass. He told me "If we entered, we'd have to win", and since he's mostly Government-funded, he'd need another source of funding, which he didn't have. Whittaker, who heads a related but separate operation, the Field Robotics Center, decided to do it on his own.

    Whittaker issues a constant stream of trival press releases, like Team Equipped with Laptops and Office Equipment [redteamracing.org]. We have considerable respect for the Robotics Institute at CMU, but this is becoming embarassing.

    We take Team Caltech seriously, but not Whittaker's operation.

    We will give a presentation on September 24, in EE380 [stanford.edu] at Stanford, on how we're doing it, and will show our vehicle, which isn't vaporware.

    John Nagle
    Team Overbot [overbot.com]

  • First problem (Score:5, Funny)

    by blair1q (305137) on Monday September 08 2003, @12:48AM (#6897628) Journal
    Design a Robot that can drive alone from Barstow to Las Vegas without dying of boredom.

  • This scares me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Qrlx (258924) on Monday September 08 2003, @12:57AM (#6897655) Homepage Journal
    From the display board [darpa.mil], "It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces...that by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles of the Armed Forces are unmanned." -National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001 (S. 2549, Sec. 217)

    That is very scary to me. Who decided we want this? I do not want our military, any military sending ROBOT TANKS into battle.

    If anybody can provide any history or background on where this "mission statement" is about, I'd love to know. The development of autonomous, mobile killing machines is extremely distrubing. I also wonder if some of the participants in this challenge are so focused on the million dollars that they don't quite realize what they are building.

    I'm reminded of the movie Real Genius, where the huge laser they spend all semester working on turns out to be some black ops superweapon.

    Just imagine what an autonomous tank with human targeting capability could do against even a lightly armed population. For example: "You have fifteen seconds to comply."

    There is, somehow, a line between war and senseless slaughter. I think unmanned ground combat vehicles cross that line. They need to change the name back to Department of War if they're going to be building stuff like this.
    And as cool and engaging as this challenge is, I can't support it.

  • Damn, it's fast (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EnglishTim (9662) on Monday September 08 2003, @05:13AM (#6898222)
    Reading the DARPA site, the route will be up to 300 miles long, and has to be completed in under 10 hours - that's an average speed of 30mph, cross-country.

    No wonder they don't expect any contestants to finish on the first race - I think you're going to have to have a fair amount of luck just to not break the vehicle at any point.

    Nevertheless, I can't wait to see it...
      • Well, you COULD stuff your coke shipment in a $100,000 robot, OR you could have a dozen Mexican kids do it for $5 apiece, or just in exchange for not beating the fuck out of their mothers. And if you're Al Qaeda, I think it's a fuck of a lot easier to just recruit the dozen or so of those kids that get picked up while they're in prison.
    • I was thinking the same thing. Get this rule:

      If the width of a Route segment is insufficient for passing, and the impeding Vehicle is moving, the passing Vehicle must wait until there is sufficient room to pass. No time credit will be given to the following Vehicle(s).

      That combined with the fact that they're all started simultaneously means one poorly-operating entrant could potentially hold up ALL other entrants. At the very least, they should do staggered starts (there is a reason ALL off-road rally r

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