This should be good - I hope Speedvision covers it! or Comedy Central! :laugh: San Francisco Chronicle February 15, 2004 Pg. 1 Robots, Start Your Engines: It's A Mad, Mad, Mad Race Driverless cars to be tested in the Mojave By Chuck Squatriglia, Chronicle Staff Writer Dave Hall climbed behind the wheel of his Toyota pickup and fired up the engine of a vehicle that just might revolutionize warfare -- and the daily commute. A screen on the dashboard came to life, showing the road ahead as seen by two cameras on the truck's roof: a tree here, a light pole there, a hedgerow up ahead. Hall typed a few commands into a laptop computer, eased the truck into gear and took his hands off the steering wheel. Two tons of steel rolled forward and made a jerky left out of a parking lot in Morgan Hill. It gained speed and settled into a lane. It followed a curve to an intersection. It stopped. Then it turned right and continued down the road. All by itself. By this time next month, the truck that Hall and his brother Bruce spent nine months building will be racing other robotic cars in a mad dash across the Mojave Desert -- the grand finale to the Grand Challenge, an unprecedented contest sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The rules are simple: Vehicles must cross 200 miles of rugged terrain between Barstow and Las Vegas in under 10 hours with no human assistance whatsoever. After turning their vehicles on, the teams simply sit back and watch. The first team to cross the finish line wins a cool $1 million. That's nothing to sneeze at, but the real money, contestants said, comes with marketing the technology. Military applications are just the start, they said; robotic vehicles will radically change transportation. Commuting would be a snap. Rental cars could meet you at the airport door. Tractors would harvest crops on their own. If the technology works, that is. Not everyone expects someone to cross the finish line, because just reaching the starting line is a huge challenge. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency -- the gee-whiz Pentagon outfit that brought us the Internet, stealth bombers, "smart bombs" and a short-lived terrorism futures market -- has for 40 years dreamed of the day when robotic vehicles would wage war. It has thrown vast sums at defense contractors who, so far, haven't accomplished much. Despite recent strides in robotics -- small, remote-controlled robots are exploring caves in Afghanistan and clearing explosives in Iraq -- building an autonomous vehicle tough enough for battle has proved all but impossible. The biggest hurdle has been making vehicles see obstacles and react to them; the technology needed to do so is only now emerging. Disappointed by the slow pace and facing a congressional mandate that one-third of all Army ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015, DARPA decided to kick-start the research by inviting any scientist, engineer or gearhead with an idea to give it a try. The competition has attracted teams ranging from robotics powerhouse Carnegie Mellon University, which has budgeted $5 million for the task, to former NASA engineers to a pair of guys cobbling together a vehicle in their garage in St. Louis. The three Bay Area teams are just as eclectic. Dave Hall, 52, and his brother Bruce, 45, are robotics enthusiasts who made quite a splash a few years ago on "Robot Wars," televised gladiator-style bouts between remote-controlled robots. They call themselves Team Digital Auto Drive after the navigation system they developed for the Challenge. John Nagle, 55, is a retired software engineer from Redwood City who has three patents under his belt. He leads the 11 engineers and programmers who call themselves Team Overbot. And Anthony Levandowski is the 23-year-old UC Berkeley graduate who leads the Blue Team, a group of Cal students that has built a motorcycle that can balance on its own. Experts agree that the biggest challenge in building a robotic car is developing perception software that allows the vehicle to see the terrain, recognize obstacles and plot a course. DARPA won't disclose the exact route of the Grand Challenge until two hours before the race March 13; it has promised a rigorous route that will include rocks, gullies and streams. Another difficulty is getting so many complex systems -- the perception and navigation software, the motors that control the accelerator, brake and steering and so forth -- to work together. "It's very difficult to automate a piece of equipment and make it think and react like a human being would," said Daryl Davidson, executive director of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, whose 4,000 members worldwide build or use robotic vehicles. The three Bay Area teams are taking similar approaches to clearing that hurdle. The Halls chose a Toyota Tundra four-wheel-drive truck because the Pentagon said the race course could be traversed using an ordinary pickup. The heart of the system is a pair of cameras, mounted in a box atop the truck, that provide an image of the course ahead to a pair of computers that scan the terrain 60 times a second for obstacles. The computers determine the best course through or around the obstacles and communicate with a navigation computer controlling the motors that run the accelerator, brake and steering. After nine months of work, there are still some snags -- the truck can't make sharp turns, for example -- but they are minor and, Dave Hall said, easily fixed. "It works," Bruce Hall said. "Now we're into serious debugging." Dave Hall has done most of the work on the vehicle, which has cost $40,000 -- including the price of the truck. They are so confident of the system that they plan to let the truck drive itself, with them riding inside, to Southern California for the Challenge. "If it isn't ready by then, we're in big trouble," Bruce Hall said. Nagle and the guys on Team Overbot, most of whom have some connection to Stanford University, chose a Polaris six-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicle, priced at $11,000. Although it is far smaller and slower than a pickup -- it doesn't go much more than 40 mph -- it is tough as nails. "Slow but very robust," Nagle calls it. A laser atop the vehicle scans the terrain for obstacles as a camera follows the course. That information is fed to a computer that, with help from a global position system, plots a course and drives the motors that control the accelerator, brake and steering. Nagle and his crew have spent thousands of hours designing and building the vehicle and writing the software that makes it all work, and they're not done yet. "The technical issues are all solvable," said Robert Sheridan, a mechanical and electrical engineer working on the project. "The question is time." Levandowski and the Blue Team threw the Pentagon a curve by entering a small, off-road motorcycle. Although the decision exponentially compounded the difficulty of the project by forcing them to create a vehicle capable of balancing itself, Levandowski said a motorcycle is a logical choice because of its speed and agility. At only 18 inches wide, avoiding obstacles at speeds approaching 100 mph will be a snap, he said. "We're not thinking about the easiest solution," Levandowski said. "We're thinking about the best solution." The motorcycle uses vision technology similar to that used by Hall and Nagle and several other teams. The only difference is their cameras are mounted on a gyroscope that allows them to remain level as the motorcycle leans into turns or climbs hills. A global positioning system coupled with an inertial sensor that, in effect, mimics the human vestibular (the portion of the inner ear that controls balance), keeps the bike from falling over. The system drives a computer that controls small motors that control the accelerator, brakes, clutch and shifting mechanism. It works. Well, sort of. The bike hasn't gone much farther than 30 feet on its own, but Levandowski remains upbeat. "We are making good progress," he said. "But we don't expect full stability before next week." Of the three local teams, only the Halls expect to finish the race -- and even they aren't sure they'll do it in the required 10 hours. The others said they would be happy just to finish the week-long shakedown tests the Pentagon has planned at Ontario Motor Speedway before the Challenge. Even the most optimistic supporter of the technology believes the world is at least 10 years away from seeing robotic vehicles rolling into battle. But even that may be a stretch. A report last year by the National Research Academies' National Research Council concluded that the Army won't meet the congressional mandate to automate one-third of its ground combat vehicles by 2015 without a serious infusion of cash and work. "I think it's highly unlikely," said Frank Rose, vice president of research at Radiance Technology and chair of the committee behind the report. "You've got to invest substantially more, by a factor of three or four." The report concluded that there needs to be more emphasis on developing perception systems that allow the vehicles to "think" for themselves, and suggested that the best way to advance the technology was to concentrate on building a single vehicle to accomplish a specific task. And that, Rose said, makes the Grand Challenge just the ticket for revving up research. "It will take the research and prototypes out of the lab and into the field," he said. "It's one thing to have a device that works on a track in the backyard, and quite another to have one make it across terrain that is not at all friendly. "I think there's a good chance someone will do it." - Bill
very interesting stuff. if anybody can foot the bill, its DOD. they got some neat vehicles hidden away. i once rode in a prototype jeep that was awesome, it had diesel and electric drive and some kind of special four wheel independent suspension that you could drive fast over a tall curb and while i was bracing for the hard jolt, all i felt was a slight bump, that thing was unbelievable. i got alot of strange looks when i hauled it down DC to display on the mall with a 50 cal. machine gun mounted on the back. when your truck says U.S. Navy on the side, you can do alot of things that would get most people pulled over. that unmanned vehicle should have some good applications. i agree, someone will do it. this is America, we can do anything. henry
