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A Million Bucks: a pittance for the Pentagon, half the cost of a Patriot Missile, by some estimates. Enough, however, to pit big science against a hodgepodge of entrepreneurs, high school students, geeks and grease monkeys in a challenge to design a 21st Century "My Mother the Car," an autonomous robot to race across the desert. The DARPA Grand Challenge, a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, (who brought us the Internet, studied gecko feet with the aim of empowering soldiers to walk up walls and dreamed up the discredited Terrorism Futures Market) commandeered a roadside saloon and corral called the Slash X near Barstow, California as the starting point for what was supposed to be a race to the finish across 114 miles of Mojave to a place called Buffalo Bill's in Primm, Nevada. Once out of the gate the vehicles would be on their own, with no human intervention allowed except for a DARPA-controlled stop switch (good idea as one robot weighed 16 tons). Marines were stationed along the route to ensure that no desert tortoises became robot-kill. But, nobody finished.
VIDEO
Nobody pocketed the million and nobody was expected to, according to Air Force Col. Jose Negron, DARPA Grand Challenge Program Manager. The goal, according to Negron, was to harvest fresh ideas from outsiders in a government-mandated quest to create drones to keep troops out of harm's way. "Robot planes are easy," says Negron, "they don't face obstacles other than other planes." A ground vehicle in the desert, on the other hand, has to face cacti, tortoises, rocks, washes, canyons, SUVs, UFOs, dead mobsters and other obstacles.
It was a grand party, a Woodstock for geeks: high-tech gurus, name-brand news media, teams pulling all-nighters, sharing tools, parts, ideas and flat beer. My wife and I attended to promote Team LoGHIQ, a father, son and a team of school pals who made their name building solar cars and who constructed their robot from parts bought off of E-Bay, a $150 computer motherboard from VIA Technologies (for which we do PR), Humvee tires and other stuff scrounged from their basement in upstate New York. You may have seen some of our VIDEO COVERAGE (Windows Media) of this group on Tech TV, CNN and a bunch of TV stations in the US. Team LoGHIQ, which stands for "low on gas, high on IQ," spent a total of about $8 thousand on the entire project while Carnegie Mellon University was said to have blown through $3.5 million. For this event, we decided to push the envelope and produce what we think is the only video of the DARPA Grand Challenge in HDTV (We didn't see any other cameras around). Read about it and check it out on our home page. DARPA says it will stage another Grand Challenge in about 18 months. Only a few hundred fans, family and friends made the long trek to the desert this time. Next time, with a robot "craze" seemingly in the making, it might be wise to book early. Barstow was jammed. It will probably won't see such crowds again until the next time DARPA's "little dogies" git along.
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Of the 25 vehicles
that qualified, only 15 rolled to the starting gate and only three negotiated
past the first brown mile. One bot caught fire, one ran around in circles, another
crashed into a concrete barrier guarding the press corps, one got tangled in a
wire fence which it managed to wind around its axles, while others just wandered
off like Altzheimers patients. The favored entry, from Carniegie Mellon University
stalled after 7.4 miles.
