Gizmodo: darpa urban challenge

Mystery of Pentagon DARPA Cars Revealed, Deep Throat Spills

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:55:00 EDT

Our Deep Throat at the Pentagon's parking lot has sent us an update with new pictures and the reason why the DARPA Challenge cars have taken over the military installation today: "they are showing off." After all, the men with the funny hats pay the bills. You can check his complete explanation here.

DARPA Urban Challenge Cars Invading Pentagon Parking Lot

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 09:30:19 EDT

Gizmodo reader Andrew Friend was strolling yesterday through the Pentagon's North Parking back to the office when he noticed the car above, MIT's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge, which aims to produce a car that can run completely automated in any conditions, without human intervention. He reported today that all the challenge cars arrived today—"they must be doing something on the weekend when the parking lot clears out," he said. With no notice of a new challenge, what are all those cars doing there? Some possible answers, Google Maps location and a video showing how good these cars are, right after the jump. Updated: check the extra images from different cars and all the details about what is going on from another reader at the Pentagon right now.

I've got pics from the DARPA cars at the Pentagon. The six finalist teams were there for the Urban challenge and they had a briefing at 1145 in the auditorium as well as showed off the vehicles from 0945-1300 in the center courtyard.

What are they doing there?

Besides launching a robotic coup against the U.S. military? They are really just showing off what they've done. Because the actual DARPA Urban Challenge comp has already happened, they are really here to just show off what DARPA has been up to to the military brass.
I don't know how familiar you are with this, but the DARPA challenge had two parts: the off-road, and the Urban. The Urban was obviously a much greater challenge and in talking with the guys there were something like 90 teams who had to have their vehicles navigate a military air base (think small suburb) with their vehicles and hit a series of GPS check points.

According to them they were allowed to drive around the area 24 hours before so they could get a feel of it, but then on the day of they were given a USB stick that had 10-15 gps check points the cars had to hit. So they loaded that into the computer, but were not allowed to load any sort of "route" in. Then they just had to it start on the autonomous vehicles and hope for the best. What's really cool—like all of this isn't already—is that they had something like 50 stunt drivers drive around the area while the robocars were moving to challenge the vehicles and make sure they didn't collide. As you can tell, 6 of 90 teams (it could have been a few more) were the only ones able to succeed, so it was quite the task.

Bonus Option: none of the above, just this:

[Gizmodo]

Watch the DARPA Urban Challenge Final Live, Don't Forget About Us

Haroon Malik — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:50:00 EDT

If you are planning on showing Gizmodo no love this morning, we shall excuse you if you ditch us for the awesome DARPA Urban Challenge. The DARPA Urban Challenge hopes to pursue technologies that may replace humans on the battlefield. Teams enter an unmanned, robotic and autonomous vehicle, which is released in a mock city environment and must complete certain tasks to succeed. The main objective is for the robotic vehicle to carry out simulated military supply missions, whilst simultaneously negotiating their way through traffic and past obstacles.

The preliminary stages involve knockout rounds, but today is the juicy final! The fastest team will be heading home with $2 million in their pockets, whilst second and third place will net $1 million and $500, 000, respectively. The final, to be held in Victorville, California, shall begin at 7am PDT and you can watch the live webcast by hitting up the link. Alternatively, if you are bandwidth limited, catch the liveblog via The Register, instead. [DARPA Urban Challenge, Liveblog, The Register]

Robot Car Crashes Into Manned Vehicle; Where'd You Learn to Drive?

Charlie White — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:55:00 EDT

The $3.5 million DARPA Urban Challenge semifinals are underway, and in these qualifying rounds the robot cars are all vying for the right to participate in the actual race on November 3. On this qualifying course, you can see Axion Racing's vehicle, "Spirit," making a pretty dumb move, taking a left turn directly into one of the human-driven Ford Taurus chase cars. No, robot SUV, the idea is to avoid those stunt car is driven by the humans, not attack them. There were a couple of another small accidents with another vehicle yesterday, one from Georgia Tech, which was having a bit of trouble dealing with the protective guard rails set up in the parking lot course. On the other hand, a robot Chevy Tahoe built by Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing seems to be doing quite well in the proceedings thus far. [TG Daily, via Danger Room]
UPDATE: Whoops, we almost forgot, Axion sent along a close-up pic of the Spirit robot vehicle, but look out, there are a couple of twins showing off their backsides as they demonstrate the vehicle, so it's almost NSFW. We tried to airbrush/photoshop out the naughty parts for readers working in churches and preschools, to no avail.

Of course, this is the vehicle before that little mishap, so imagine it with a dent or two and that'll bring you up to date. What vehicle, you say?