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Robot Vehicles Line Up for Race in the Desert; Pentagon Doubles Purse to $2 Million

Posted on: Wednesday, 14 September 2005, 12:00 CDT

Cresting a hill on a gravel road at a brisk 20 miles an hour, a driverless, computer-controlled Volkswagen Touareg plunges smartly into a swale. When its laser guidance system spots an overhanging limb, it lurches violently left and right before abruptly swerving off the road.

With their robotic Touareg, known as Stanley, impaled in the brush, the two passengers Sebastian Thrun and Michael Montemerlo, both Stanford computer scientists pull off their crash helmets and scramble out to untangle the machine.

A quick survey reveals that the sport utility vehicle is covered with debris, but the bug-eyed laser, radar and optical vision system on top of the vehicle is undamaged. So Stanley and its passengers continue on their way, over 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, of dirt road through a cactus-covered landscape, in the final weeks of preparation for the second round of the Pentagon's great race.

It has been almost 18 months since the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, first attracted a motley array of autonomous vehicles with a prize of $1 million for the first to complete a 142-mile desert course from Barstow, California, to Las Vegas. The most successful robot, developed by a Carnegie Mellon University team, managed all of seven miles.

With the next running scheduled for Oct. 8 and this time a $2 million purse for the winner among 43 entries it is clear that many of the participants have made vast progress. For some researchers, it is an indication of a significant transformation in what has been largely a science fiction fantasy. "Computers are starting to sprout legs and move around in the environment," said Andy Rubin, a Silicon Valley technologist and a financial backer this year of the Stanford Racing Team, which produced Stanley.

Rubin, who tinkers with robots himself, was the co-founder of Danger, which created the Sidekick hand-held computer. The Pentagon agency, known as Darpa, struck upon the idea of a race calling it the Grand Challenge as a way to stimulate innovations useful in battlefield applications like unmanned logistics vehicles.

For the two Stanford scientists, however, the Grand Challenge is about something larger. "The military are interested in more potent weapons, and by itself that's a bad answer," said Thrun, a roboticist and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His broader goal is to advance robotics as a science and explore applications ranging from aids for the elderly to basic advances in intelligent computerized systems.

Several years ago, when Thrun was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and when Montemerlo was a graduate student, they helped develop a prototype of a mobile robotic companion for the home that used natural-language voice commands and that was able to provide useful information taken from the Internet like weather and television schedules.

There are many other possible applications for their software, which can reason about the immediate environment; distinguish sky from ground, road and trees; and make lightning-quick decisions.

Already in the automotive industry, intelligent cruise control has become more adept at automatically maintaining the spacing between cars, and intelligent lane-change and collision-avoidance software is close to being a reality.

Robots are routinely used in manufacturing, and in Japan a "house sitter" robot that is 3 feet, or almost a meter, tall and that can recognize 10,000 words and 10 different faces will go on sale in September, offered by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

In the Darpa contest, though, the proving ground is not the home but the desert. And several of the contestants, who range from garage hackers to teams from giant automotive and aerospace corporations, say the course this year is expected to be even more difficult than the one last year.

The exact course will be secret until just hours before the event begins, but Darpa officials are said to believe that the original test was too much an exercise in automatically following global positioning satellite "bread crumbs" the data points outlining the route that are given to the contestants shortly before the race begins.

So this year the course is likely to include unexpected man-made obstacles and other hurdles that would be trivial for a human driver, but vexing for the computer-controlled navigational systems that are at the heart of the technical challenge the Pentagon has laid out. Thrun jokes that they are up to the test, noting that Stanley's navigational software will include an algorithm that permits "cow detection," or the ability to detect and avoid moving objects in its path.

Despite the added complexity, there is a widespread expectation among robotics researchers that this time the course will be completed. The machines, many of which wandered seemingly randomly in the desert last year, have benefited from more than a year of experience as well as a significant rush in improvement in every aspect of robotic vehicle technology. After fixing two software bugs, the Stanford team managed to put Stanley through the entire test course on Sept. 7 without crashing.

In the actual race, of course, there will be no passengers along for the ride. The teams will be able to follow a short distance behind but will have no communication with their vehicles.

For the two researchers, who have been leading a team of 60 developers from Stanford and Volkswagen, the setbacks have all been part of the process of trying to create machines that can mimic what human drivers do effortlessly.

The challenge is heightened by the obvious rivalry that the two scientists feel with their alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. This year, the Carnegie Mellon Red Team led by a legendary roboticist, William Whittaker, known to all as Red is testing two robotic vehicles, Sandstorm and Highlander, in the Nevada desert.

With an imposing array of sponsors including Caterpillar, Intel, Boeing and Google, Whittaker's team is once again the favorite.

Whittaker says he is confident that more than one team will finish the course this year.

"I would love it if the high school kids won this year," he said, referring to a team from Palos Verdes High School in California, which is backed by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analog Devices, Goodyear and others.

Source: International Herald Tribune

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