Stanley, the off-road DARPA winner
The winners of last year’s Pentagon-sponsored robot race are back to take on another challenge — this time to develop a vehicle that can drive through congested city traffic all by itself.
Stanford University, whose unmanned Volkswagen dubbed Stanley won last year’s desert race, was among 11 teams selected Monday to receive government money to participate in a contest requiring robots to carry out a simulated military supply mission.
Stanford, which teamed up with the German automaker again, will enter a Passat sedan outfitted with the latest sensors, lasers and other high-tech gear. Engineers have tested the car on a closed course and will begin actual tests after scientists finish writing the program that will serve as the car’s brain.
The competition, slated to take place in a yet-undisclosed location in November 2007, is supported by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to spur development of military vehicles that could fight in war zones without any sort of remote control.
The robotic vehicles will have to navigate a complex 60-mile test course designed like a real city street filled with moving manned and unmanned vehicles. Participants will be tested on how well they make sharp turns, navigate traffic circles and avoid obstacles such as utility poles, trees and parked cars. The vehicles will also have to obey traffic laws, change lanes, merge with moving cars and pull into a parking lot using only their computer brain and sensors.
Forget the military function. I know civilians who can’t get from here to there — even with a cell phone, map and GPS — in their car. We should use this competition to build vehicles for the cable guy.
I wonder if there will be extra points for running down kids that get in the way.
Perhaps we should decide who to sue when someone is run down.
Now!
When cars can drive themselves there will be no reason for police to arbitrarily make traffic stops. This may actually improve our civil rights a tad.
Traffic may also improve, since it is how we drive that causes congestion and not how many of us there are on the road.
Besides, you won’t have to look for a parking spot; just call your car when it’s time to go home.
I say bring it the fuck on…..
I think they should solve the robot vacuum cleaner’s shortcomings on dealing with cat hair first (and no, vacuuming up the cat isn’t an option) before they move on to MS-SUVS.
The best of AI technology is likely a long way off from being able to differentiate between street kids making a game out of tossing soccer balls in front of a vehicle and a real 2 year toddling into the street. Spending more on making human operated military vehicles safer from IEDs would be a better investment at a time when military budgets are stretched to the limit.
If you click on the dates in the left-hand column of the page linked below the terrible facts speak for themselves.
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/
I go along with the idea that it’s way past time to remove the human element from behind the wheel. People can’t drive, and over forty thousand men, women and children die each year in the Unites States alone because we can’t accept it. If that many died in airline crashes there would be a great knashing of teeth all across the land, but highway deaths have become just a routine news item, about like the weather.
test course designed like a real city street filled with moving manned and unmanned vehicles. (emphasis added)
I think I’ve seen a few of those ‘unmanned’ vehicles around Rush Hour.
J/P=?
#2: You sue the programmer, of course!
So what poor city gets to be the guinie pig?