Carnegie Mellon University’s Tartan Racing Team showed us who’s boss on Saturday with a winning truck named Boss. The Chevy Tahoe robot SUV was bristling with PCs and sensors that steered it safely through a complicated city street course, winning the $2 million Urban Challenge prize from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The winner navigated the 60-mile course of simulated city streets and parking lots in about six hours, avoiding its challenging robot vehicles as well as other cars driven by stunt drivers. While there was a slight collision between the cars from Cornell and MIT, and Terramax, the 12-ton truck from Team Oshkosh almost ran into a building, the contestants apparently got all the dramatic crashes out of the way in the qualifying rounds last week.
https://gizmodo.com/robot-car-crashes-into-manned-vehicle-whered-you-learn-316645
Taking home the $1 million second-place prize was Stanford University’s robot named Junior, and third was Odin, the car from Virginia Tech, winning the $500,000 prize. Our fave, that Lotus Elise from N.C. State University didn’t win, but there’s always next year. [Technology Review and Robot Central]
https://gizmodo.com/watch-the-darpa-urban-challenge-final-live-dont-forget-318537
