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GCN Home > 03/22/04 issue

Online Extra: Grand Challenge Wrapup

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, where the robots began to take control.

As the sun rose, a fire engine-red Hummer bounded from a starting chute—fashioned from a pair of concrete bunkers—and drove off into the desert. No driver was on board. The vehicle was controlled by a set of Intel Itanium processors.

As a small crowd cheered on from the bleachers, the driverless vehicle rolled away so assuredly that one might think that a computer-driven vehicle could actually navigate itself across the Mojave desert. The Hummer, with a giant fin welded on top, gracefully guided itself down a dirt road and around the series of curves that doubled back along the path behind the staging area. Within an hour, it was a few miles from the starting line.

It was a solid start to the Defense Department’s first autonomous vehicle race, called the Grand Challenge, held March 13.

The race began at 6:30 a.m. at the Slash X Café, a tavern favored by off-roaders eight miles outside Barstow, Calif. Over the next few hours, a total of 12 more self-directing, or autonomous, vehicles would set off on a journey to find their way across 142 miles to the finish line, in Primm, Nevada. The first vehicle to finish, DARPA promised, would win a $1 million prize.

What made this event different from the usual off-road race was that once the robotic vehicles were set loose, they were entirely on their own. No remote-controlled operations were allowed. Nor was rebooting. Each vehicle had to find its own way. It was as if after 400 years of close adult supervision, machines were finally being allowed to take a few baby steps on their own.

“If a vehicle decides to go over a ravine, it will go over the ravine,” said DARPA director Anthony Tether, in a conference beforehand.

Alas, no vehicle made it past the eight-mile marker. In fact, most didn’t make it very far from their starting gates before becoming befuddled by their surroundings. A few, however, made enough headway to astonish DARPA officials.

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