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Toys United States Science

DARPA Robot Contest Update 142

Posted by michael from the hunter-seeker dept.
rbrandis writes "DARPA has selected a wide variety of teams, after a series of last minute rule changes and a solid outpouring of anger, the final list of competitors for DARPA's Grand Challenge robot race has been set with 25 teams preparing to try and win a $1 million prize." The anger is exemplified by submissions like this one: Totally_Lost writes "Last spring we flocked to DARPA's Grand Challenge media event in Los Angeles to be told that they wanted everyone's participation in their Robot race this March. They told us that the race would be open to Mom and Pop garage sized participants - and Lied. This fall, nearly 100 teams completed technical paper submissions, with about half to be eliminated from the $1M prize race because they were too small to be 'real' competitors. Well, the rejected robot racing teams got together in Las Vegas last month, and formed the International Robot Racing Federation. This month IRRF is announcing its first competition with $1M in prizes pledged by sponsors, and lesser prizes too, to be offered in a REAL OPEN Challenge next September (providing the race that DARPA failed to deliver)."
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DARPA Robot Contest Update More

DARPA Robot Contest Update

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  • DARPA not open in its policies, i'm shocked. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jester69 ( 636830 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:35PM (#7861121)
    They have always been heretofore so up front and honest. This is truly a departure for the military industrial complex.

  • It looks like DARPA wins... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mellon ( 7048 ) * on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:37PM (#7861137) Homepage
    ...beyond their wildest dreams. Not only do they get to have their own competition, which may produce some interesting results, but in addition they get to see another competition that they don't have to pay for, and if anything cool comes of it they can always step in and make an offer on the technology. Plus, a new hobby is born. Sounds like everybody wins here.
    • Indeed. Looks like it's time for me to throw a set of 18" wheels on the ole RC10 and have at.

      KFG
    • ummmmm..... The point is DARPA had this to begin with. There was no reason to not include the smaller teams. After all if they geenrate a superior design you just have to find somone to make it. As for chaos in the race... isn't that sort of the point ? They don't want bots that work under ideal cicumstances, they want bots that can legitimately operate in the real world.

      What were they afraid of ? A mom and pop low budget garage organization making a contractor or prestigious university team look silly ? O
      • What were they afraid of ? A mom and pop low budget garage organization making a contractor or prestigious university team look silly ? Oh the horror.

        Well, maybe it's a bit of reverse trade protectionism, because I've always kinda thought that was Burt Rutan's job.

        KFG
        • Burt Rutan isn't the equivalent of Orville and Wilbur. He is more akin to Langley for the monied-man rather than for the government. If you look at the X-Prize competition you'll see more money spent on Rutan's vehicle than all the others combined.
      • My experience is that when a large organization decides not to do something they promised to do the way they promised to do it, there's usually a good reason for it - it's not to salve the egos of the participants, at least in a situation like this (nonprofits salving the egos of donors is another story!). Maybe they didn't want to deal with the extra logistics. Maybe they intended to observe more closely than they could afford to do if there were 100 competitors. Maybe they couldn't afford the additi
        • I agree that they probably got a little overwhelmed with the responses, and that they never dreamed they'd get that many people applying. There's probably a little bit of coercion going on by the "big guys" who would've been all right with a couple of garage monkeys in the mix, but don't want to be fighting it out with an army of them. It probably didn't take much talking to get DARPA to say, "Yeah, that's a lot of them to keep track of. We'd better limit it to commercially viable organizations to raise
        • First off I grant you make very valid points. However, I feel they are for the most part a reflection of the lack of thought which went into the decision making process ( both here and in general ) where there was a lack of understanding about what an OPEN field really means.

          IE they chose an open format instead of a limited format. I can't see logically how this means something other than they must have WANTED as many people to show up as possible. When they got an 'overwhelming' response they should have
    • Don't be so sure. Some people really dislike being snubbed like that, and I'd be willing to bet that they wouldn't be willing to give away their tech to DARPA so easily or nearly as cheaply. For some people I know, such a snub would be enough that no amount of money could buy them. I'm not saying it's wise, but that's how they think.
    • Not necessarily. What if the winning team decides to sell the technology to North Korea? After being kicked in the nuts by DARPA, how patriotic do you think they'd be feeling?

  • Wasn't DARPA justified in their decision? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From what I've read, it seems they were correct to cull the less-advanced robots from the "herd" - their reasoning is sound.

    The presentation of the article, however, seems to be biased in favor of the poor losers; why?

    Is there evidence that they were indeed up to snuff but were drubbed anyway?

    • Re:Wasn't DARPA justified in their decision? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The point of the RACE is to cull the less-advanced robots. Why the pre-culling ?

      I have a friend on one of the University teams. The professor in charge, who had connections to JPL, forced them to design the robot to loose by setting it's top speed to slow to complete the route in the allocated time.

      As someone who spent 6 years working for a defense contractor, almost exclusively on DARPA contracts, I can attest that DARPA and the research industry around it have all the typical problems of research as a
    • Please explain how the number of people working on a project makes it more or less advanced. Please detail how a small group of people without corporate funding can't make an advanced robot. By your logic no one should use Linux because its not "advanced".
    • Well, primarily I would say because the rules were changed after entries were accepted and private individuals suffered financial loss from those changes.

      They didn't get "drubbed." They never even got the chance to get drubbed under the assumed parameters of the competition.

      Had DARPA said something along the lines of "Ya'll are welcome to give it a go, but we have to warn you that entries are strictly limited and we reserve the right to make the decision of who gets to play and who doesn't on an arbritrar
    • I am a member of a robotics team. We are building a sub-AI mobile robot very similar to the ones involved in the DARPA Challenge. In fact, we had illusions at some point of competing in a future challenge iff the challenge was not won this year.

      We compete in a similar, less-publicized contest. We have three members on our team and had a starting budget of $300. We had our PC104 board and $200 diff. GPS donated, and all of the coding has thus far been done by the three of us. We didn't have any money,
    • " From what I've read, it seems they were correct to cull the less-advanced robots from the "herd" - their reasoning is sound"

      Seems like the less advanced teams either would not have shown up or could have been weeded out in preliminary trials. That was the whole point of this exercise... to not prejudge solutions until they were proven or disproven in the field. As far as I understand, most of the entrants are still working on their machines, so to weed anyone out that submits a complete entry at this

  • Nice to see the technology is catching up... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by the man with the pla ( 710711 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:40PM (#7861162)
    .to the desire for household robots. Once upon a time, the very thought of a lawn mowing robot filled people with fear. You're not installing a robot lawn mower near my Fifi. (I'm looooking overrrrr, my dead dog Roverrrrrrr...) But robots are getting pretty good at recognizing objects, so there is hope that while mowing the lawn they won't mutilate your pets.

    Of course people don't tend to realize that robotics is in use all around them, all the time. A robot is "A mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human and is capable of performing a variety of often complex human tasks on command or by being programmed in advance", or alternately, "a mechanism that can move automatically".

    Besides the mechanical aspect necessary for something to be robotic, there is the usual criteria for a useful electronic circuit. It must sense, decide, and act. Even a door-opening device at your local supermarket can do this; it senses that something has entered sensor range, it decides whether the signal is strong enough to warrant opening the door (partly based on its sense of what its function switch is set to) and then decides whether or not to open it. The act stage in this case causes motion, which is what makes it a robot.

    While we often hope to see robots become more useful around the house, I believe that it is in major industrial scenarios that they will take off first. This is not a shocking prediction given that this is where they currently enjoy their greatest successes, but I am referring to more autonomous robots than those which currently paint cars and so on. For instance, large earthmoving projects could be carried out with little to no human intervention simply because the problem domain is so simple. Through use of a combination of sensors (including visual/optical, radar, sonar, lidar, and others) a sophisticated map of geometry can be built. If you're not moving very quickly, this can be done with sufficient accuracy using current technology to carry out moderately complicated tasks.

    I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring.

    The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem. It's bad enough when the jobs leave your country, but only the corporations (and of course the consumers - but they have to have jobs in order to consume!) benefit when the jobs go to robots.
    • As far as dealing with the unemployed, there once was an SF story (sorry, I don't remember which) where the author posited an agreement that each employee who was replaced by a robot received a share of the company's profits based on the robot's productivity. This tended to keep folks busy making sure their robots were in good working order, and had some workers saving part of the money to upgrade their robots to be more productive.

      Not saying that's the best solution, but it is A solution - to show that fu
    • I work for an industrial robotics company. In my experience, when a company buys a robot to augument an existing production line, they are trying to increase throughput on the entire line. Any workers directly replaced by the robot are retrained and moved upstream from their former position on the production line. Only the workers that cannot be retrained lose their jobs.
    • Are autonomous vehicles, designed to win military-industrial funding, household robots?
    • The question posed, then, is what do we do with all the people who will soon be unemployed by robots? Aside from forming labor unions and legislating inefficiency, what is the solution? I cannot picture any true capitalism managing to care for people displaced by robots, which will only happen with increasing regularity as robotics becomes a better-solved problem.

      The cost of labor in other areas will drop as the labor force is retrained to work in these other areas. For example, maybe they'll be retrained

    • PLAGIARIST (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This post was copied from one back in October [slashdot.org].

      "the man with the pla" is a common troll.
    • You envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems eh? Hasn't Sony or someone already thought of and is in the process of this?
  • The some people don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up

  • Justice for the little bots (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd help sponsor a robot army that could be marched on Washington. They could all go and try to lift up the Pentagon. Would be quite a sight, put those DARPA jerks in their place, and have a lot more teeth than those damn hippies who tried to levitate the building. Might just get some government contracts out of it, if you're willing to sell out to the man.
    • I can see it now, hundreds of little metal boxes with spinning saw blades, on their way to DC, followed by another group of metal boxes with hydraulic lifting arms. Word is they may only be able to lift the Pentagon about a foot off it's foundation, though.

  • You don't want to win this contest (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Winning team gets classified as enemy combatants, free vacations in Gauntanamo, ceding all prize money and rights to the design. They only winning move is not to play.

  • Just like WWF (Score:5, Funny)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:49PM (#7861237) Homepage
    All sorts of heated tempers and a split to a rival federation. All they need now is a few good rants, some cage matches, and one bot hitting another with a chair or something. It'll be a shoe-in for weekend afternoon TV. w00t!

  • This is good... (Score:3, Funny)

    by fizban ( 58094 ) <fizban@umich.edu> on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:51PM (#7861257) Homepage
    ...because you never can have too many autonomous bomb-delivery devices.

  • Deja vu for a RW competitor (Score:5, Informative)

    by carndearg ( 696084 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @01:58PM (#7861322) Homepage Journal
    Looking at this story I have a strong sense of deja vu. As a member of a team [smidsy..net] competing in the UK Robot Wars [robotwars.co.uk] series I remeber 2 or 3 years ago when a disparate group of teams either rejected by, disenchanted with or simply not involved with the TV production company [mentorn.co.uk] tried to go it alone with an independant combat robots association. Their business model was based around a touring roadshow for which they set about building a mobile arena. In principle this was a fine idea, but AFAIK it stalled for lack of money and management issues.

    I appreciate that the DARPA teams are working in a different ballpark from your average garden shed RW team. But the same basic economic rules apply and looking at the web site the sense of deja vu is increased. If they've got these sponsors then power to them but yet again the www site is a little sparse on the subject. You need more than just a shared sense of rejection to make a business model.

  • If you don't have your own machine shop ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by inonit ( 309889 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @02:00PM (#7861338)
    You may want to check out RARS [sourceforge.net], a simulator framework in which you can write programs to run in a simulated auto race against other programs. I haven't messed with RARS in a while, but at the time I was using it, (IIRC) your driver was a C++ class that received a huge struct as a parameter and returned a small struct indicating the direction you wanted to steer and a number indicating gas/brake magnitude.

    But what do I know -- my car could barely make it around the track without running into the wall.
  • Maybe it's just me, but I detect a tone of "the government should be our caretakers" tone in the story.

    In reality what this group is doing is exactly what should happen in our free society. Especially in this case where the government primed the pump in promoting science and an independant group comes in to provide more promotion of science.

    Why the reaction of surprise? A project like this is most certainly something to be expected and welcomed.

  • The real issues Grand Challenge competitors face (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @03:00PM (#7861833) Homepage
    The real things competitors are complaining about are these:
    • This is turning into a breadcrumb-following exercise. DARPA provides a "waypoint file" on CD-ROM two hours before the race. For each segment between waypoints, there's an allowed path width, indicating the area in which the vehicle must stay or be disqualified. Originally, the vehicles were supposed to be truly autonomous, with the DARPA-supplied waypoint data providing only general corridors. That's what made this interesting. Then DARPA said they would provide about 1000 GPS waypoints. Now they're saying it will be about 5000 GPS waypoints. With 25 waypoints per mile, it may be possible to do this on GPS alone, blindly driving from waypoint to waypoint, with some minimal obstacle detection and avoidance. That's not "autonomous". That's preprogrammed, like the old Milton Bradley Big Trak toy.
    • Some teams are using a "semi-autonomous approach". In the two hours between the release of the waypoint file and the start of the race, large numbers of people at remote sites will manually plan out each segment of the trip, using aerial photographs and maps. The trip segments will be combined, downloaded to the vehicle, and used to drive it. DARPA has approved this approach. That's not "autonomous", either.
    • Government funding of entries has been a big issue. Caltech is using the "Perceptor" software package, which fuses overhead and ground imagery. Perceptor was developed with DARPA funds at JPL, and is not available outside JPL/Caltech. The Caltech team formally asked DARPA if this was OK, and DARPA said yes. Other teams complained. The head of the CMU team is currently a principal investigator on NASA's Hyperion robot program, which raises some red flags about Government funding. DARPA is now requiring teams to provide a "certification of self-sufficiency" statement, with lines like "If the hardware and software is proprietary to my team, it was not developed or purchased using U.S. Government funding either directly ... or indirectly". CMU has received Government funding for robotics work for decades, and it's not at all clear if any of that crept into their entry.
    • We're hearing rumors that the 2004 event might be the last one, even if nobody wins. This is apparently an internal issue within DARPA, and we haven't heard details. DARPA's officially stated position is that the event will be held "approximately annually" until someone wins through at least 2007, when the Congressional funding runs out.

    The selection process wasn't hard for anyone who had a clue. DARPA was evaluating papers for months, and you could resubmit as many times as you wanted. DARPA warned entrants in the rules that it might take several turnarounds to get a paper through. The people whining about rejection submitted papers at the last minute.

    We'll be in Fontana in March.

    John Nagle
    Team Overbot

    • I'm curious --- why is it a big issue to have government funidng? Presumably the problem is the combination of government funding + proprietary? Off-hand, I would think that DARPA would like to see government-funded work used in the competition, because it would confirm that the work they were funding was good. On the other hand, there's always the danger that it would confirm that the work was no good, but they should be willing to face that too.

      After all, the mission of DARPA is to support good resear

  • Padding the big-3s pockets (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Teahouse ( 267087 ) on Friday January 02, 2004 @03:05PM (#7861877)
    A simple, and typical DARPA formula:

    1. Announce a nice, big, open competition for ideas, welcome everyone.

    2. Get everyone's papers and technical submissions for free.

    3. Suddenly, cut the field to 25 well-qualified, well-financed groups. Forget you welcomed everyone.

    4. Change the specifications to include some of the more innovative ideas you got, for free, from the small groups you exclude.

    5. Run your "competition" touting how fair it is.

    6. In the end, award the contract to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockeed. Pay them three times what the small contractor would have charged.

    7. Lather, rinse, repeat.

    The reason we don't innovate anymore in this country is because true innovation comes from free-thinkers. Darpa and the DOD don't get that anymore, and rely on the same old staid companies to do everything. They'll get a RC vehicle with half the capabilities they originally hoped for at three times the price. Who needs innovation? Just keep feeding the defense-contract monster.

    • 6. In the end, award the contract to Raytheon, Boeing, Lockeed.

      One small error...Raytheon is #4. And, you forgot #3, Northrop Grumman.

      I've worked on DARPA projects, for one of the above companies...those folks are SO fickle it's rediculous. There's no need for any conspiracy as these companies are virtually guaranteed contracts because of political influence. Weather or not you think that's a bad thing, it seems to have worked well enough to keep us from getting the shit kicked out of us so far.
  • When I first heard of this Grand Challenge I was estatic. I thought I could "compete with the big boys". Ever since that day I have been working steadfastly on my robot - integrating computing power with grid technologies, beefing up off-the-shelf sonar gear (fish-finders!) for horizontal and non-water use, experimenting with vision-processing software, developing a custom "behavior stack" using subsumption and goal-based directives - and integrating the whole mess into a cohesive package. But God Love '
  • My friend's team made it and they have NO sponsors (or none at the time they got accepted) and are just a few guys working out of someones garage. They got in because they had a good plan and had already made solid progress on their vehicle.

    Perhaps this complaining from the small teams is just a case of sour grapes? Perhaps they didn't have a solid plan or any sort of progress and really had no chance to win?

    That isn't a flame, I honestly don't know. I just know that there is at least 1 unfunded (well, pe

    • The complaints seem to be that mnny teams had been promised funding conditional on being accepted, and that the initial position seemed to be that there was plenty of scope to submit a far out idea and have it accepted. Now DARPA only want "serious" competitors, i.e. people telling them what they already know. That's idiotic; the idea of this challenge is for people to demonstrate unproven ideas.

      Now that DARPA have turned it into a GPS waypoint challenge, it seems fairly clear that they've already got e

  • I'm sure there's some sort of hilarious parallel that can be drawn between this contest and the Terminator movies, but my brain's dead. Anybody want to take a stab at it?

    • Re:Terminator (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm sure there's some sort of hilarious parallel that can be drawn between this contest and the Terminator movies, but my brain's dead.

      Anybody want to take a stab at it?

      You're posting a RFQ for a joke on Slashdot? That's lazy man.
  • I for one welcome our new International Robot Racing Federation masters.

  • DARPA (Score:1)

    by fjm03 ( 548420 )
    Here's an agency with way too much money and time on its hands.
  • I envision a cluster of wirelessly networked systems which will share computing time with one another when they have cycles to spare, working together to carry out such a project. The sum of the data from stress analyses, efficiency plans, and so on would be combined to carry out tasks as rapidly as possible. Ultimately, people will be able to focus on management tasks rather than laboring. Having someone hack into a Caterpiller D9 bulldozer and go on a rampage brings a whole new meaning to "wardriving." ;

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