CMU First To Qualify For DARPA Grand Challenge

Anonymous Coward writes "As of 18:00 March 9th, Carnegie Mellon's Red Team is the only entry to successfully complete DARPA's Grand Challenge Qualification Inspection and Demonstration (QID) before the main event on March 13th. The NY Times has this article detailing this first step towards winning the Grand Challenge."

Cost to PRIZE ratio.

[normal_guy]

I can't be the only one who questions motives when the $1M prize is being sought after by a team with more than $2M already invested. What is the eventual payoff?

Re:Cost to PRIZE ratio.

[Anonymous Coward]

the educational experience of making such a machine? :p

the real prize != money

[sczimme]

The real prizes:

the knowledge gained throughout the project

getting one's name published for taking an active role in the project (which can lead to further opportunities)

the overall experience, i.e. 'Hey, I did that"

The pursuit of intellectual challenge is not about money...

Re:Cost to PRIZE ratio.

[fuctape]

Fame and name recognition. In the year 2050, you'll hear, "On the Chinese front, a Sandstorm batallion was attacked. There were, of course, no casualties, thanks to the autonomous technology pioneered in 2004."

You've got admit that it'd be amazing to be credited with an 'historical' level invention.

Interesting, but ...

[gravityZ]

... doesn't this basically lead directly to the US military dropping off Robo-Tanks in foreign countries as they please? We know that a steady diet of wars figure heavily in the plan [newamericancentury.org] for the forseeable future. The Robo-Tank cuts down on friendly casualties, thus making conflicts more palatable to the public.

Now I find this as cool as anyone else, from a technological standpoint. And it definitely has civilian applicability. But let's face it, this contest isn't about finding cheaper ways to haul cargo or reach remote locations.

Re:Cost to PRIZE ratio.

[Ethon]

As stated in one of the replys to your post, the DoD will probably be offering a long term contract to manufacture similar vehicles for actual combat/whatever use. The DoD has already done this with the new-gen X planes, as seen on PBS' NOVA. [pbs.org] The DoD's JSF competition will probably end up paying the winner (Lockheed) some $1T in total contractual monies.

Re:Cool

[tuffy]

I guess in the states it's form over function :-P and an ugly form at that ;)

They're not all that functional either - unless a mountain should suddenly spring up on the way to the kids' soccer practice. Obviously a few people have a need for those sorts of vehicles, but I question the volume of them I see on the road.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

The hummer gets 9mpg. You can buy cars in the US that get 70mpg (diesel golf, Prius), but not many people want them. It's not that we are less advanced, it's that we are greedy and evil.

Re:How is this impressive?

[BirdTracker]

They are going to be traveling through a dynamic landscape, they aren't just driving over sand dunes or across open desert. They are given waypoints, but the waypoints are each a mile or two apart which leaves plenty of room for pathfinding in the middle.

If the military invades with these, they aren't just going to tell it to go somewhere and kill someone, they are going to give the machines very specific directions. If they dont have a map...they could probably get one in a few hours anyway, so I don't think that will be a big issue.

Re:How is this impressive?

[Tom7]

From what I understand, the "loophole" allows them to use 1m satellite imagery of the route and, in two hours, plan something for the robot to follow. The robot still has to see its way when it's going, to avoid ditches and rocks and other things--it needs to do "local" route planning at 35mph. Even if the route were totally pre-programmed, the problem of following that route would still be pretty hard over hundreds of miles. You can't just do "dead reckoning."

What about if they invade somewhere they don't have good maps of? Somewhere with a dynamic landscape (desert, rocks etc)?

This is in the desert, and they're doing it with only satellite imagery.

There's a huge amount of mechanical and software engineering in this thing. I think that someone must have exaggerated this "loophole" to you, because it is far from making the project easy (as far as I know, it doesn't help them in the quals at all). The robot is impressive!

Re:the real prize != money

[kidgenius]

Not too mention the possibility of future contracts that can net your school some major cash.

Re:How is this impressive?

[miracle69]

I'm not sure that it is a loophole. It's not as challenging as doing it the other way, but let's face it, this is being done for the military, and you're extremely naive to think that the military doesn't have precise topography maps of the entire world, or that they can't obtain such maps in short order. Remember, a key component to cruise missile technology is topography. Remember in GWI, the cruise missiles took hours and hours to program before launch. Now, they can be reprogrammed in minutes.

So, the current method used by the Red Team may likely be how the military would implement it in the first generations of this type of equipment. Plan the best route manually and then tell the automaton what track it should generally take and let it navigate the minor obsticals.

Disclaimer: I'm not involved in DARPA in any manner.

Re:How is this impressive?

[dave420]

So they have hundreds of terabytes of information in the back just for shits and giggles? Why isn't anyone else taking that path?

It doesn't have to think about navigating - they're telling it how to do that. It has to only deal with getting round obstacles in its path. They're removing 1/2 of the problem so they can put their effort behind the other half, which the other teams aren't doing. It just smacks of unfairness, that's all.

Re:Interesting, but ...

[demachina]

Based on recent experience I would take the military's word for once, though only once. If you look at Iraq most of the casualties weren't in combat. Soldiers in fast moving, heavily armored, M1 tanks really weren't that vulnerable.

Its probably going to be a real long time before you trust a robotic tank to discriminate friend or foe and to decide when and when not to start lobbing shells. Combat really should have a person in the loop who can react quickly to a complex and changing situation, one that often requires nuance. I wager an RPV tank is the only thing you may see anytime soon.

But if you look at Iraq the place where the Army is VERY vulnerable is convoying supplies from one place to another since they are sitting ducks for improvised explosive devices and ambushes. I could see robotic transports as priceless for this if they can cope with a predefined route, not run anything over and deal with obstructions.

Supply lines have always been the achilles heel of occupying armies. Indications are the U.S. military doesn't really need much help in the conflict phase, but it does need a lot of help to minimize the casualties and manpower needed to occupy its colonial empire.

The biggest issue I have..

[Desco Bin Lada]

with this is simply how cheap the US military is getting away with this. Instead of setting forth a proposal, taking bids, working in tandem with one of the big development houses, they offer up a rediculously small prize. If they had gone through someone like Lockheed Martin, they project would have easily cost them into the 100 million dollar range. Oh well. Hopefully the military will get what they paid for.

Don't forget bragging rights for alumni

[chia_monkey]

Yup, those are some pretty cool prizes. But we gotta remember other prizes, like bragging rights. I'm already sending this article all over to my fellow CMU almuni friends, to other non-geek friends, etc. All this, and I have nothing to do with robotics and graduated almost ten years ago. Woohoo! I love bragging rights...

Re:The biggest issue I have..

[way2trivial]

which method is likely to come up with the more innovative solution?

you think this is a bad idea? they have how many engineers and people working on the problem? and if they used a 100 million and a team of lockheed martin?
and you think this is WRONG?

Re:Cost to PRIZE ratio.

[Ralph Wiggam]

I've read a few articles about the Grand Challenge and they all seem to focus on CMU, the favorite. From what I understood, pretty much all of that $2M-$3.5M cost figure came in the form of free stuff from Intel, Boeing, and many others. It's not like the grad students are writing $150,000 personal checks to buy parts.

The students probably can't pocket any prize cash anyway because of ethics rules. If they win, the students will get a rocking party and even more top notch equipment in their labs.

It's not a race to prove you're better than the other teams and get prize money. It's a race to advance the state of a specific technology. Do you think people are going to get rich winning the X-prize?

-B

Re:The biggest issue I have..

[Zathrus]

with this is simply how cheap the US military is getting away with this

Getting away with what? Basic R&D?

So you'd rather have them spend a few billion on a single supplier, who may not be able to deliver anything, and then keep all the technology as classified for an unknown period of time? Yeah, that's a great use of taxpayer money.

Instead, they put out a challenge that allows both public and private industry to participate. Any useful technology could be immediately spun off for commercial use, and considerably less taxpayer funds are used (yes, public universities will use some taxpayer money as well, but it pales in comparison to the alternative).

Oh, and they're still not "getting away" with anything. DARPA doesn't automatically get the technology. If they get a winner then they'll have to negotiate licensing terms.

Hos is this the least impressive?

[KFury]

The point of the Darpa project is to advance technology for driverless military vehicles, primarily for convoy work. To my mind, creating a computer system to quickly plan out routes based on intelligence is an important part of a practical solution.

Not only does it more accurately reflect the technology's intended use-case in the military field (convoy operators would lilely be given a general route a couple hours before a mission, instead of simply told, 'get it to this point and leave right now') but it also means that more of the technology is outside the vehicle.

A cost-effective solution would need to have as cheap a vehicle as possible. While a fully autonomous system might be nice for a science fiction 'technology run amok' film, in reality it's more effective to have sparse mobile systems with an ops center capable of planning routes for several vehicles.

It also costs less when one goes 'wheels up' or is captured by the enemy.

I was there

[Kallahar]

I went by the event yesterday as a spectator and got to see Red Team do their run. Of the 23 teams who made it this far, they're the only one that has completed the qualification course so far. People complain that they have a more accurate map and that they're not doing real AI, but based on their performance on this surprise course, they have a real obstacle avoidance system.

In one section there was a minivan parked in the center of the GPS path. Of the eight vehicles I saw run, only three made it past the car. Three hit it, and the rest failed before making it that far.

It seemed that the biggest problems teams had were getting GPS right. Several drifted off course or turned the wrong way, going off course. One got the next GPS coord inside of its turning radius so it kept circling a spot until they turned it off.

Lots of great designs though, and some really impressive engineering.

Re:Mars Rovers

[citanon]

Caltech manages JPL, the NASA lab that developed the rovers and their associated software.

Originally, the Caltec team was using rover software. However, when DARPA changed contest rules a couple months ago, it went back on its earlier ruling and said that Caltech was no longer allowed to use the rover software because that software was not commercially available.

This led to Caltech redoing much of the work on their vision software. They are now using the modified version of a commercial vision package.

I personally think that DARPA could have done better by asking JPL to make the software available to ALL teams instead of taking it away from Caltech.