Desert Robot Race Update, With Video 180
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."
race vs challenge (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:2, Interesting)
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 least if it had some kind of camera and a remote pilot they could stop it before it triggered a land mine
Re:Interesting project which will kill a lot of fo (Score:2, Interesting)
All I can say... (Score:2, Interesting)
That and Mopar never gave me these options [redteamracing.org] when I bought my Jeep!
advertisement (Score:1, Interesting)
the mpeg - my first slashdotting (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Interesting project which can save some lives (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:the mpeg - my first slashdotting (Score:2, Interesting)
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 it before the tech took action.
www.cfxhosting.com - pretty good guys
Damn, it's fast (Score:3, Interesting)
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...