DARPA Urban Challenge Qualifiers Underway
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 29 of October , 2007 at 6:06 am
The qualifiers for the DARPA Urban Challenge started on October 26, with 35 teams competing for 20 slots in the finals, which will start November 3rd. If you’re not familiar with the DARPA Grand Challenge series, the first successful one took place in 2005. It was an off road race for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile stretch of rugged Mojave desert terrain. The vehicles used GPS, cameras, lasers, and a ton of complicated software to navigate themselves over the course, and in the end, three of them made it. You can watch an awesome hour long NOVA program on the race online here. The next challenge, taking place this year, places the robot cars in an urban environment, where they will have to contend with speed limits, stop signs, and other cars. The vehicles will have to traverse the 60 mile environment in less than 6 hours with no human intervention to win the $3.5 million prize, and they’ll have to obey all California state traffic laws along the way, which is something that most people probably can’t pull off. Danger Room has some excellent coverage of the first few, uh, fatalities. The final will be webcast live on November 3rd, check the DARPA website for details.
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Category: Artificial Intelligence, Competitive, Military, Research
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