The Grand Challenge
Computers, start your engines. The DARPA Grand Challenge is about to begin. Starting September 29 and continuing through October 6, unmanned vehicles will attempt to drive 150 miles across a desert in 10 hours. The vehicles will not be remotely driven. They must navigate solely on the strength of their onboard computers and sensors across the course and to the finish line. The sponsor, DARPA, is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the contestants come from all over the United States and from several foreign countries. You can follow the progress of the race at www.grandchallenge.org. It contains links to individual teams and their team blogs.
The Seattle Times says this:
The military sponsors the race to speed the development of unmanned vehicles for combat. The project had an inauspicious start: Last year's inaugural contest ended soon after it began when the robots careened off course or abruptly stalled. One even got tangled in barbed wire. ... This year's race shows signs of being extremely competitive. Some vehicles have logged hundreds of self-guided miles in the Southwestern desert during summer practice runs. Several even tested on last year's course ... Vehicles will have to drive on dirt and gravel, maneuver mountain switchbacks, squeeze through choke points and avoid man-made and natural obstacles.
Carnegie Mellon's Red Team (brought to you by Caterpiller) has video links here and they are heavy downloads. One of the entrants is a robotic motorcycle. Check out the Blue Team at www.ghostriderrobot.com, which has video of their robotic contestant swimming underwater (Sort of. Mutley needed here.), doing ramp jumps and other cool stuff here. Any ideas on who'll finish first?
posted by wretchardthecat at 9/28/2005 02:13:00 AM
21 Comments:
I am going to DARPA challenge next week with my son! Really looking forward to that...
The enemy has had robotic fighters for some time - homicide bombers.
goesh,
but they are not "smart" bombs
Is not DARPA the group we have to thank for doing some of the original development work that created what we now call the internet?
DARPA... ARPA...
Hmmm. Sounds like a Himalayan Sherpa derivation. But the only person I've met that wrote some of the original coding had a Scottish name.
This is way too early.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency always has their hands into some really cool stuff. The kind of thing they do is seed things that our not quite ready for prime time. This motivates some of the best innovation and attracts a lot of scientists. The good folks themselves at DARPA, though a bureaucracy, are some the most intelligent themselves.
Interestingly, during the Clinton years, the name was changed from DARPA to ARPA (’96) [was ARPA before] , drop the Defense, for all so politically correct reasons. I begun calling it GARPA. You can guess what the “G” stood for. And then, some genius no doubt, decided that the “D” somewhat justified their existence and is where the 2 billion dollar budget comes from.
SciFi tells us that letting computers network together is like introducing 2 of your enemies to each other but ARPAnet turned out pretty cool.
Geesh,
As war fighting machines robots are already being used tactically with EOD teams. It’s the semi-autonomy that makes them particularly useful. At present, Unmanned Air Vehicles have range guided take-off and landing capability, but all the operator has to worry about is ‘dig’n in the GPS coordinates on his mapping software and the UAV does it. Semi-autonomy in the air is relatively simple, one must just avoid controlled flight into terrain, the operator is busy running the sensor suite, pipe lining data to command, and firing Hell Fire missiles. One hell of a computer game.
On the other hand Unmanned Robotic Vehicles have a real hard time negociating terrain, but pack ‘em with sensors and you have an excellent way to ferret out IEDs. They are used by police in hostage situations, and, you know, lots of applications will be realized when a vehicle can more or less figure things out for itself on the way.
Smart money is on a repeat of last year. As amazing as the projects are, the course is extremely tough and remember, these vehicles cannot be remote controlled. They have to be fully autonomous. But out of hometown pride, I'm gonna go with Team Cajunbot.
2002 article: Robot Wars for Real
In this article, they set 'predator' robots after 'prey' robots. The Prey live on solar power cells, the Predators suck the juice out of the Prey's batteries. Wonder how it all turned out?
The motorcycle bot is amazing, I guess it has gyros in those boxes to keep it upright?
This whole topic is what I'd like to hear Ray Kurzweil talk about. I'll have to buy his book, maybe he does talk about it. Hey Ray - HAL was scary but Terminator rocks!
Spirit and Opportunity both have autonomous mode for marrain navigation.
And yes arpanet was where it started, Algore was there. If you don't believe him, you'll get the real story if you just ask him.
Nathan,
Thanks for the clarification, that sounds like a wiggly ride.
I think Nathan has nailed the issue why the Blue Team has such problem. The first thing I went there to look is to find out who's behind each team. The Red team has professionals from corporate sponsors and have experienced design robots for exploration. They have an edge over the Blue team assumed all talent is equal. My money is on the Red.
Nathan,
Thanks for your analysis on this, keep writing.
I'm still stuck on how the ghostrider stays upright. It obviously DOES stay up and exhibit robust stability - I looked at the film clips on the gimbal testing but it seems that's all about how to keep the sensors oriented, not how they keep the bike stable like they do.
The gimbal certainly turns quickly enough to twitch the front wheel around in any eventuality, I just find it odd that front-wheel turns is enough to stay upright. It wasn't enough for me when I was on a motorcycle, I can testify to that.
Keep writing.
Traditionally, we often have attributed personalities to our ships, aircraft, jeeps, tanks, even favorite rifles.
In fact, I know damn well that my almost 60 year old aircraft has a personality distinct from others of its type.
It will be interesting to see how close the man-machine interface becomes when the machines really do have "personalities".
Nathan,
if you look at the link of Wired Magazines last year about the race, there are other teams spending $ at par or even higher than the Red Team. Here is the Link
The Blue Team spends the least (1/3 of the average) and they are the only one enter the race with a motorcycle (I think), so I give them the most innovation and inspiring award to tackle the challenge, whether it's necessarily to do so. But that's what the young and the restless is all about. My hat to them.
Technically, as an electrical & computing guy, I understand the concept to detect obstacle, range finding and terrain negotiation and these tools are readily available to put together but anyone know how a 4 wheels or a 2 wheels negotiate a ditch?
Although the MSM, disparaged the first DARPA Grand Challenge I found the results interesting (last year the MSM only showed the vehicles going astray and maded sneering comments as each vehicle failed).
I note that there will be some qualifications at Fontana [California] Speedway (NASCAR has races there) and it's in my back yard. I may just check it out. Overall I think the Grand Challenge is a great idea.
Also, I think Nathan has a good handle on the players. One thing that I have always wondered - how is the course is kept secret until just prior to the event?
With the huge population in Southern California one would assume some player would catch wind of the actual course and possible program it into his/her vehicle (or design the vehicle exactly for the terrain). I say this because the vehicle must travel an average of 15 miles per hour over rough terrain to go the distance of 150 miles in 10 hours. If the terrain is severely rugged the larger "Monster Truck" type vehicles would have a greater chance of success (unless they have to cross the Sultan Sea, Colorado river, or the like, in a boat like fashion). Thus, there could be some incentive to peek at the course well before the event.
One of the programmers I work with is on one of the teams (as a hobby); it will be it will be interesting to talk to him afterwards about the race.
Nathan,
In pursue of my curiosity of ditch detection and negotiation, I found a PhD thesis proposal from Alex Foessel of CMU and this paper from
Cal Tech. The PhD thesis proposal is about milimeter waves radar technique while the Cal Tech is optical image processing technology. But reading more into the vehicles radar techniques, it seems they are all optical either laser or high resolution mono/stereo cameras. If DARPA wants to make life harder for these guys, they just lay a bunch of smoke screens and we will see some of them will arrive in Mexico or will not detect ditches in time and end up at the bottom of the lake :)
Good info Nathan. That cleared-up most of my questions.
Nathan,
If the idea of the degree of belief in the 'passability' of a particular direction can be expanded to include other terms, some of which would contain tactical information, you could create an array of vectors of N-length, representing moves, where N is how "far" you can see ahead. How is the expected value of the forseen moves brought into the reckoning?
Corrected links
Alex Foessel
Cal Tech Terrain Perception of DEMO III
The PhD proposal is dry but the presentation of the Cal Tech is digestable.
Nathan,
What you are talking about in terms of sensor fusion and ratings is a common technique in OCR (Optical Character Recognition). There are many techniques to achieve OCR accuracy, and each OCR engine combines many (hundreds) of approaches to recognition. Each engine tends to be a little better at particular classes of characters/documents. These days, with modern desktop processors, multiple engines run concurrently. Then a "voting" procedure compares all the results of each engine, where each engine has assigned a probability to the likelihood of a specific character/word's identity. The combined votes lead to the decision on the character that is recognized.
I would assume this same "voting" approach would be used in combining inputs from multiple sensors.
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