The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for driverless cars, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA’s mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their use for national security. DARPA has technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, The DARPA Urban Challenge, scheduled to take place November 3, 2007, further advances vehicle requirements to include autonomous operation in a mock urban environment.

History and Background

See Driverless car.

The history of autonomous vehicles starts in 1977 with the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan. On a dedicated, clearly marked course it achieved speeds of up to 20 miles per hour (30 km/h), by tracking white street markers (special hardware was necessary, since commercial computers were much slower than they are today).

The breakthrough in autonomous driving came in the 1980s through the work of Ernst Dickmanns and his team at Bundeswehr Universität München and work funded by DARPA as the Autonomous Land Vehicle. Dickmann's vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robot van achieved 60 miles per hour on streets without traffic. The subsequent 800 million Euro EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987-1995) brought further progress. A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when the twin robot vehicles VaMP and Vita-2 of Daimler-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns of UniBwM drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h, albeit semi-autonomous with human interventions. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.

Also in the 1980s the Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) achieved the first road following demonstration that used laser radar (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan), computer vision (Carnegie Mellon University and SRI), and autonomous robotic control (Carnegie Mellon and Martin Marietta) to control a driverless vehicle up to 20 mph.

The next culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1000 mile trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 110 miles per hour on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9km, or 95% autonomous driving. Again it drove in traffic, executing manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without human intervention.

Successor technology from that begun for the ALV, in 1995, the CMU Navlab project achieved 98.2% autonomous driving on a 3000-mile (5000 km) "No hands across America" trip. This car, however, was semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to control the steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were human-controlled.

Another milestone of vehicular robotics is the well known ARGO Project, an Italian project (1996-2001) to allow a car to follow the normal (painted) lane marks in an unmodified highway. The culmination of the project was a journey of 2,000 km over six days on the motorways of northern Italy dubbed MilleMiglia in Automatico, with an average speed of 90 km/h. 94% of the time the car was in fully automatic mode, with the longest automatic stretch being 54 km. The ARGO vehicle, a modified Lancia Thema, had only two black-and-white low-cost video cameras on board, and used stereoscopic vision algorithms to understand its environment. This is in stark contrast to the "laser, radar - whatever you need" approach taken by other efforts in the field. The project was run by the university of Parma, coordinated by Prof. Alberto Broggi, Director of the well known VisLab Laboratory.

The abilities of these early vehicles heavily influenced research world-wide, including three US Government efforts known as Demo I (US Army), Demo II (DARPA), Demo III (US Army). Demo III (2001) demonstrated the ability of unmanned ground vehicles to navigate miles of difficult off-road terrain, avoiding obstacles such as rocks and trees.

The Grand Challenge was the first long distance competition for robot cars in the World; to date, there have been other competitions for semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles, but none on the scale of the Grand Challenge. The U.S. Congress authorized DARPA to offer prize money ($1 million) for the first Grand Challenge to facilitate robotic development, with the ultimate goal of making one-third of ground military forces autonomous by 2015. Following the 2004 event, Dr. Tony Tether, the director of DARPA, announced that the prize money had been increased to US$2 million for the next event, which was claimed on October 9, 2005. The first, second and third places in the 2007 Urban Challenge will receive US$2 million, US$1 million, and US$500,000, respectively.

The competition is open to teams and organizations from around the world, with the proviso that they have at least one U.S. citizen on the roster. Teams have participated from high schools, universities, businesses and other organizations. More than 100 teams registered in the first year, bringing a wide variety of technological skills to the race. In the second year, 195 teams from 36 US states and 4 foreign countries entered the race.

2004 Grand Challenge

The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge was held in the Mojave Desert region of the United States, along a 150-mile route that follows along the path of Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California-Nevada border in Primm. None of the robot vehicles finished the route. Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team traveled the farthest distance, completing 11.78 km (7.36 miles) of the course. The distance may be misleading in measuring the accomplishment, however, as some of the most difficult terrain was located at the start of the course.

Preliminary tests

Prior to the main event in the Mojave Desert, the teams were required to navigate a mile-long obstacle course at California Speedway. Three teams were able to successfully complete the entire course, while three more almost completed it and another half dozen teams completed a portion of the course. After it became clear that the challenge may be over before it even began (with the high failure rate as the teams worked the kinks out of their vehicles), DARPA decided to scrap the initial tests and allow fifteen of the teams to run the race anyway, in the hopes that the many mechanical problems experienced by the teams would be sorted out prior to the main event.

The event

Unfortunately, the failures of the vehicles during the preliminary tests were indicative of how the vehicles would perform on the actual course. Only three hours into the event, a mere four vehicles remained operational. The vehicles that failed suffered from a variety of mechanical problems: "stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers, and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment."

Within a few hours, all of the vehicles in the challenge had suffered critical vehicle failures, had been disqualified, or had withdrawn. The furthest any of the teams had gotten was the Red Team's 7.4 miles, less than 5% off the full length of the course (the vehicle (Sandstorm) went off-course in the tightest hairpin turn and got stuck on the embankment). The next furthest vehicles were those of the SciAutonics II Team, which traversed 6.7 miles before becoming stuck on an embankment; Digital Auto Drive, which drove 6.0 miles before getting stuck on a rock; and the Golem Group, which made it 5.2 miles before getting trapped on a steep hill.

The results

Although the initial race was deemed a failure due to no vehicles even achieving anything close to the goal, DARPA had committed to running the challenge again for as long as Congressional authority allowed (which would have run to 2007, but the goal was reached in 2005).

The first Grand Challenge is considered by some to be a success in any event, merely on the basis that it has spurred interest and innovation. The requisite logic dictates that, as long as overall forward progress is being made, the program is a success.

In addition to the difficulty many vehicles had with the harsh terrain, a critical problem many initial designs had concerned the inability to handle two distinct problems simultaneously: sensing upcoming obstacles and following the GPS waypoints. DARPA Grand Challenge deputy program manager Tom Strat said, "some of the vehicles were able to follow the GPS waypoints very accurately; but were not able to sense obstacles ahead....Other vehicles were very good at sensing obstacles, but had difficulty following waypoints or were scared of their own shadow, hallucinating obstacles when they weren't there."

Several teams announced plans to return again in the years to come, taking the lessons that they learned from the 2004 event and applying them to future designs.

2005 Grand Challenge

The 2005 Grand Challenge began at 6:40am on October 8, 2005. This time "Stanley", the robotic Volkswagen Touareg of "The Stanford Racing Team", beat the field—completing the 212.4 km (132-mile) race with a winning time of 6 hours 53 minutes and 58 seconds. Four other vehicles successfully completed the race. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.36 mile) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race.

Vehicles in the 2005 race passed through three narrow tunnels, included more than 100 sharp left and right turns. The race concluded through Beer Bottle Pass, a winding mountain pass with sheer drop-offs on both sides. Although the 2004 course required more elevation gain and some very sharp switchbacks (Daggett Ridge) were required near the beginning of the route, the course had far fewer curves and generally wider roads than the 2005 course.

The natural rivalry between the teams from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon (Sebastian Thrun, head of the Stanford team was previously a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon and colleague of Red Whittaker, head of the CMU team) was played out during the race. Mechanical problems plagued H1ghlander before it was passed by Stanley. Gray Team’s entry was a miracle in itself, as the team from the suburbs of New Orleans was caught in Hurricane Katrina a few short months before the race. The fourth finisher, Terramax, a 30,000 pound entry from Oshkosh Truck, finished on the second day. The huge truck spent the night idling on the course, and was particularly nimble in carefully picking its way down the narrow roads of Beer Bottle Pass.

National Qualification Event (NQE)

Of the original 195 applicants, initially 40 teams were selected to participate in the National Qualification Event (NQE). Three teams were added on Aug. 23, 2005 to the semi-finalist 40 teams who were selected from site visits, sending 43 teams to the NQE.

The National Qualification Event was held at California Speedway in Fontana from September 27 through October 5. The results of the NQE were used to cut the 43 teams down to 23 for the race on October 8.

Vehicle performances at the NQE were judged by (1) elapsed time to complete the course; (2) number of obstacles successfully passed without contact; (3) number of gates successfully passed. DARPA did not reveal the relative importance of these three factors. DARPA's final ranking of the vehicles, for purposes of pole position in the Grand Challenge Event (GCE), may have been partly subjective.

The results of the 2005 DARPA NQEs are shown below sorted top to bottom by runs completed and gates passed, compiled from DARPA's published NQE results. This ordering does not correspond to DARPA's ranking of team performance. (For example, this ordering does not reflect speed as an element of performance.) Teams highlighted in green were the teams that DARPA selected to participate in the Grand Challenge desert race.

Team name	Run 1			Run 2			Run 3			Run 4			Finishes	Total gates	Desert race participant
	Time	Gates	Obstacles	Time	Gates	Obstacles	Time	Gates	Obstacles	Time	Gates	Obstacles
Stanford	10	50	4	9	50	4	11	50	5	11	50	5	4	200	Yes
Red Team Too	10	47	3	9	50	4	10	50	4	10	50	5	4	197	Yes
Red Team	9	47	4	10	48	5	11	49	5	9	50	4	4	194	Yes
Terramax	27	47	3	22	47	4	21	49	4	25	50	3	4	193	Yes
Axion	15	36	5	16	40	4	12	40	2	12	41	3	4	157	Yes
IVST	x	44	2	11	44	3	8	47	4	11	49	4	3	184	Yes
Sciautionics	x	22	1	16	46	4	14	48	4	14	48	5	3	164	Yes
Buckeyes	x	10	0	21	49	4	16	49	4	25	50	4	3	158	Yes
Caltech	x	21	0	16	44	5	12	44	4	16	49	5	3	158	Yes
Cornell	x	9	0	10	49	4	12	50	4	12	50	5	3	158	Yes
VA Tech Rocky	x	9	0	13	48	4	15	49	5	15	49	5	3	155	Yes
Mojavaton	x	20	1	x	30	1	15	47	2	16	48	2	2	145	Yes
ENSCO	x	19	0	x	21	0	13	44	4	15	50	4	2	134	Yes
CIMAR	x	9	0	x	30	1	15	46	4	13	47	3	2	132	Yes
Golem	x	0	0	x	31	1	9	49	4	12	50	5	2	130	Yes
Insight Racing	x	12	0	x	17	0	29	47	4	17	49	5	2	125	Yes
DAD	x	10	0	x	24	0	10	42	4	11	44	4	2	120	Yes
MonsterMoto	x	0	0	x	12	0	14	47	5	13	49	5	2	108	Yes
Princeton	x	0	0	x	9	0	13	48	4	12	50	5	2	107	Yes
Team Jefferson	x	10	0	x	16	0	x	36	1	18	49	5	1	111	No
Cajunbot	x	0	0	x	18	0	x	29	1	16	49	4	1	96	Yes
Austin	x	5	0	x	21	0	x	22	0	52	45	4	1	93	No
Grey Team	x	2	0	x	14	0	x	15	0	16	48	5	1	79	Yes
UCF	x	6	0	x	8	0	x	17	0	28	47	5	1	78	No
Va Tech GC Team	x	0	0	x	5	0	x	16	0	17	44	3	1	65	Yes
Banzai	x	0	0	x	6	0	x	16	1	21	39	3	1	61	No
Mitre	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	10	0	21	44	5	1	54	Yes
AION	x	1	0	x	3	0	x	8	0	35	33	3	1	45	No
Juggernaut	x	8	0	x	15	0	x	17	0	x	36	1	0	76	No
AI Motovators	x	8	0	x	14	0	x	16	0	x	33	2	0	71	No
Blue Team	x	6	0	x	13	0	x	16	1	x	20	1	0	55	No
Indy Robot Racing	x	6	0	x	12	1	x	14	0	x	23	0	0	55	No
Tormenta	x	4	0	x	10	0	x	15	0	x	20	0	0	49	No
CyberRider	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	1	0	x	36	2	0	37	No
Overbot	x	4	0	x	6	0	x	10	0	x	11	0	0	31	No
Terra Engineering	x	0	0	x	6	0	x	7	0	x	14	0	0	27	No
AVS	x	0	0	x	3	0	x	7	0	x	16	0	0	26	No
Autonosys	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	9	0	x	14	0	0	23	No
BJB Engineering	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	2	0	x	13	0	0	15	No
PVHS	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	3	0	0	3	No
Indiana Robotic Nav	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	2	0	0	2	No
Oregon Wave	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	0	0	No
Underdawg	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	x	0	0	0	0	No

There were four NQE runs. The above four major columns are sorted from worst to best runs of each team. "Time" signifies the time in minutes for a completed run and "x" indicates an incomplete run. "Gates" indicates the number of gates along the track that were passed (there were 50 total per run). "Obstacles" indicates the number of obstacles on the track that were passed (there were 5 total per run). "Finishes" indicates the total number of runs that the team successfully completed (there were 4 runs total). "Total Gates" indicates the total number of gates that the team successfully passed. The teams are sorted from top to bottom according to runs completed and then by total gates passed. Teams indicated as a "desert race participant" are those teams invited by DARPA to participate in the Grand Challenge desert race. Source data

For the first and second run, only 4 obstacles were present whereas for the third and fourth runs 5 obstacles were present. The NQE results presented in the table above show each team's runs sorted left to right from their worst run to their best run in order to better illustrate relative ranking (i.e. not in order of the actual run sequence).

On October 6, the selected teams transported their robots to the starting location. On October 7 the teams had a day to fix any portions of the robots broken in the course of transportation prior to the actual race.

Race

A Google Talk video about the DARPA 2005 race is available at Google Video

The route to be followed by the robots was supplied to the teams two hours before the start as a computer file with GPS coordinates, one every 72 m (237 feet) of the route, with more frequent waypoints in difficult patches. Some teams then went against the spirit of the competition by using topographic maps and aerial imagery to manually map out and program precise path and speed settings (CMU's Red Team employed 13 route editors.) Once the race had started, the robots were not allowed to contact humans in any way.

Each robot started at a different time and was "paused" for different amounts of time during the race; DARPA compensated for the staggered start times and subtracted the pause time from each robot's total to derive its final official time. The $2 million prize was awarded on Sunday, October 9, 2005.

The 2005 competitors were much more successful than those of 2004; only one failed to pass the 11.84 km (7.36 mile) mark set by the best-performing 2004 entry, Sandstorm. By the end, 18 robots had been disabled and five robots finished the course. On the first day, Stanley from Stanford University, and H1ghlander and Sandstorm from Carnegie Mellon University, finished within minutes of each other, with Stanley crossing the finish line first. Kat-5 from Gray Team started much later, but finished in a comparable time. The race paused overnight with one competitor, TerraMax, left on the course at mile 83; TerraMax had the stage to itself on Sunday as it belatedly rumbled home.

The winner of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was Stanley, with a course time of 6 hours 53 minutes and 8 seconds (6:53:08) with average speed of 30.7 km/h (19.1 mph). CMU's Sandstorm followed with 7:04:50 at 29.9 km/h (18.6 mph) and H1ghlander at 7:14:00 at 29.3 km/h (18.2 mph). Gray Team's Kat-5 came through at 7:30:16 with average speed of 28.2 km/h (17.5 mph). Oshkosh Truck's Terramax finished at 12:51 and would not have been eligible for the prize because it exceeded the ten-hour limit.

The Official Website (requires Flash player plugin) contained a map and positions of the competitors, while TG Daily posted a running summary of the day's events.

Race Participants

Vehicle	Team Name	Team Home	Time Taken (h:m)	Result
Stanley	Stanford Racing Team	Stanford University, Palo Alto, California	6:54	First place
Sandstorm	Red Team	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania	7:05	Second place
H1ghlander	Red Team Too		7:14	Third place
Kat-5	Team Gray	The Gray Insurance Company, Metairie, Louisiana	7:30	Fourth place
TerraMax	Team TerraMax	Oshkosh Truck Corporation, Oshkosh, Wisconsin	12:51	Over 10 hour limit
DEXTER	Team ENSCO	ENSCO, Inc., Springfield, Virginia	DNF	Out of race at 81 miles; tire blowout after going off-course due to bent frame
Spirit	Axion Racing	Westlake Village, California	DNF	Out of race at 66 miles; got stuck in sand, possibly after mechanical failure in suspension
Cliff	Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team	Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia	DNF	Out of race at 44 miles due to vehicle motor mechanical problems.
Rocky	Virginia Tech Team Rocky		DNF	Out of race at 39 miles; a steep hill caused the oil in its generator to slosh around. The generator's low-oil sensor went off, cutting power to computers.
ION	Desert Buckeyes	Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio	DNF	Out of race at 29 miles
DAD	Team DAD	Digital Auto Drive/Velodyne Acoustics, Morgan Hill, California	DNF	Out of race at 26 miles; LIDAR scanner failed, loose wire due to vibration.
Desert Rat	Insight Racing	North Carolina State University, Cary, North Carolina	DNF	Out of race at 26 miles
Xboxx	Mojavaton	Grand Junction, Colorado	DNF	Out of race at 23.5 miles
Golem 2	The Golem Group/UCLA	Los Angeles, California	DNF	Out of race at 22 miles; software bug crashed main computer causing 60mph rampage
CajunBot	Team Cajunbot	University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana	DNF	Out of race at 17 miles; The motor on the brake actuator burned out when vehicle was paused for about fifty minutes.
RASCAL	SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering	Thousand Oaks, California	DNF	Out of race at 16 miles; software problems
Desert Tortoise	Intelligent Vehicle Safety Technologies	Littleton, Colorado	DNF	Out of race at 14 miles, instability in steering controller caused robot to drive offroad for a power pole.
NaviGATOR	Team CIMAR	University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida	DNF	Out of race at 14 miles; faulty reporting of GPS accuracy caused robot to drive into a bush, where a bug in "blocked path" logic left vehicle unable to recover. [1]
Prospect Eleven	Princeton University	Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey	DNF	Out of race at 10 miles. A code bug slowed down steering and throttle control, sending the robot looping in circles and narrowly missing a clump of reporters.
Spider	Team Cornell	Cornell University, Ithaca, New York	DNF	Out of race at 9 miles; when pause applied, rolled up against a guard rail; when unpaused, could not back away from rail since it had no functional backing software
Alice	Team Caltech	California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California	DNF	Out of race at 8 miles; after GPS reacquisition, veered over barrier and towards media
JackBot	MonsterMoto	Cedar Park, Texas	DNF	Out of race at 7 miles
The Meteor	Mitre Meteorites	MITRE, McLean, Virginia	DNF	Out of race at 1 mile; dust interfered with sensors causing false positive obstacle detection

DNF = Did Not Finish

2007 Urban Challenge

For 2007, DARPA introduced a new challenge, which it named the "Urban Challenge". The Urban Challenge will take place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logistics Airport), in Victorville, California (Google map).^[2] The course will involve a 60-mile (96 km) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules will include obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. While the 2004 and 2005 events were more physically challenging for the vehicles, the robots operated in isolation and did not encounter other vehicles on the course. The Urban Challenge requires designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition will operate in a more cluttered urban environment and requires the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection. ^[3]

The event is being followed closely by auto manufacturers for the implications it holds for smarter cars and safer highways in the future.

Unlike the past two challenges, DARPA has announced that some teams will receive development funding, based on proposals submitted to DARPA. Eleven teams can receive up to US$1 million a piece under this special program track (Track A) [1]. These 11 teams largely represent major universities and large corporate interests such as CMU teaming with GM, Stanford teaming with Volkswagen, Oshkosh Truck, Honeywell, Raytheon, Caltech, Autonomous Solutions, Virginia Tech, Cornell, and MIT. One of the few independent entries in Track A is the Golem Group.

On December 8, 2006, DARPA reinstalled the winning cash prize money. The winner will receive US$2 million. The second place finisher will receive US$1 million and the third place finisher will receive US$500,000.^[4]

June/July 2007 53 teams (see list below) were notified that they qualified for DARPA Site visits. If successful in these evaluations, some or all of these teams will move to a national qualifying event to take place in October 2007.

On August 9, 2007, after completing the site visits, DARPA announced^[5] the 36 semi-finalists selected to participate in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) scheduled for October 26-31, 2007. The top 20 teams from that event will proceed to the final competition on November 3. The 36 semifinalists are:

Austin Robot Technology - Austin, Texas AvantGuardium - Bethesda, Maryland Axion Racing - Westlake Village, California Ben Franklin Racing Team - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania CarOLO - New York, New York Gator Nation - Gainesville, Florida Golem Group - Santa Monica, California Insight Racing - Cary, North Carolina Intelligent Vehicle Systems - Dearborn, Michigan MIT - Cambridge, Massachusetts Mojavaton - Grand Junction, Colorado Ody-Era - Kokomo, Indiana OSU-ACT - Columbus, Ohio Princeton University - Princeton, New Jersey SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering - Thousand Oaks, California Stanford Racing Team - Stanford, California Sting Racing - Atlanta, Georgia Tartan Racing - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Team AnnieWay - Palo Alto, California Team Autonomous Solutions - Petersboro, Utah - Houston, Texas Team CajunBot - Lafayette, Louisiana Team Caltech - Pasadena, California Team Case - Cleveland, Ohio Team Cornell - Ithaca, New York Team Cybernet - Ann Arbor, Michigan Team Gray - Metairie, Louisiana Team Jefferson - Crozet, Virginia Team Juggernaut - Sandy, Utah Team-LUX - Woodstock, Maryland Team Oshkosh Truck - Oshkosh, Wisconsin Team UCF - Orlando, Florida Team Urbanator - Littleton, Colorado University of Utah - Salt Lake City, Utah UU - Westminster, Maryland VictorTango - Blacksburg, Virginia

Basic Rules for 2007

• Vehicle must be stock or have a documented safety record.
• Vehicle must obey the California state driving laws.
• Vehicle must be entirely autonomous, using only GPS and the information it detects with its sensors.
• DARPA will provide the route network 24 hours before the race starts.
• Vehicles will complete the route by driving between specified checkpoints.
• DARPA will provide a file detailing the order the checkpoints must be driven to 5 minutes before the race start.
• Vehicles may “stop and stare” for at most 10 seconds.
• Vehicles must operate in rain and fog, with GPS blocked.
• Vehicles must avoid collision with vehicles and other objects such as carts, bicycles, traffic barrels, and objects in the environment such as utility poles.
• Vehicles must be able to operate in parking areas and perform U-turns as required by the situation.

Technology

For reference, see DARPA Urban Challenge, a C++ based platform for testing Path Planning Algorithms: An application of Game Theory and Neural Networks. [2]

Critiques of the Grand Challenge

VaMP (1995) compared to Stanley, Sandstorm, H1ghlander, TerraMax, and Kat-5 (2005)

Five cars finished the course of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: Stanley, Sandstorm, H1ghlander, TerraMax, and Kat-5. It is interesting to compare them to the earlier VaMP robot car of Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns. The VaMP was built in the 1990s as a continuation of Dickmanns' earlier work at the Universität der Bundeswehr München in Munich; the project was funded in part by the $1 billion dollar EUREKA Prometheus Project.^[6] The VaMP was able to drive in traffic among moving obstacles, automatically passing slower vehicles; the DARPA cars were not (H1ghlander was standing still when Stanley passed it in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge) ^[7]. The VaMP reached speeds up to 180 km/h (111 mph); the DARPA cars were limited to top speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph). In 1995, the VaMP drove up to 158 km without human intervention on a Danish highway where most drivers adhere to the 110km/h general speed limit and passing is rarely necessary; decisions made by the VaMP were checked for validity by a human safety pilot (the 158km represent the longest stretch of thousands of km of test runs, and the terrain was self-selected by the VaMP team). In 2005, the DARPA cars drove 212 km (132 miles) without human intervention on the Grand Challenge course selected by the race organizers. VaMP drove on the mostly straight Autobahn^[6]; the DARPA cars drove on a variety of graded dirt roads, including narrow and steep mountain passes. The VaMP drove mostly by vision with some input provided by radar ^[9][10] but without GPS navigation; the DARPA cars heavily used GPS, always driving from one waypoint to the next (the DARPA course was unrehearsed by the teams but precisely given by almost 3000 waypoints, with several waypoints per curve). The DARPA cars combined other sensor data such as LIDAR, video cameras, and inertial guidance systems for better navigation in between waypoints, where road boundary identification was sometimes harder than on the Autobahn because of the unstructured terrain (Autobahn road boundaries are engineered to be easily visually observable but often partially hidden by trucks etc). The top speed of the VaMP's computer processors was 1000 times slower per dollar than those used in the DARPA vehicles^[6].

External links

Official Sites

• The home page of the DARPA Grand Challenge
• The home page of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge
• DGC-2004 Teams
• The 2005 race results page
• Announcement of the 2007 Grand Challenge (PDF)
• Meet the Players

Other Government-funded competitive prize initiatives thus far

• http://www.CentennialChallenges.NASA.gov: NASA's Centennial Challenges
• "H Prize": The Department of Energy's proposed prize for hydrogen fuel-related breakthroughs for breakthroughs in hydrogen fuel-related technology (http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/01/24/41211.aspx)

These round out the U.S. federal government's agencies having the 3 largest procurement budgets.

53 teams qualified for site visits in 2007

Team 23 Racing A Bunch of Dropouts Team AnnieWay Austin Robot Technology Team Autonomous Solutions [info@avantguardium.com AvantGuardium] Axion Racing The Ben Franklin Racing Team Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team BYUC Team CajunBot Team Caltech CarOLO Team CART Team Case Team Cornell Team Cybernet

DOTMOBIL Team Gator Nation The Golem Group grandchallenger@yrstore.com Team Grand Challenger Team Gray Highlander Racing Insight Racing Intelligent Vehicle Systems Team Jefferson Team Juggernaut Team-LUX Martian Mentors Team MIT Mojavaton Team MEXICO TeamNOVA Ody-Era Team Orange

Team Oshkosh OSU-ACT Pegasus Princeton University SciAutonics / Auburn Engineering Team Scorpion Stanford Racing Team Sting Racing Tartan Racing [embed@bellsouth.net Trobo] True Vision Robotics UBC Thunderbird Robotics Team UCF University of Utah Team Urbanator UU VictorTango

Prior Grand Challenge Team Sites

American Industrial Magic Autonomous Vehicle Engineers (Team AVE) Autonomous Vehicle Systems (semi-finalist 2005) A.I. Motorvators (semi-finalist 2004, 2005) Armani(dead link, leave for history) Austin Robot Technology (semi-finalist 2005) Axion Racing (finalist 2004, 2005) BJB Engineering (semi-finalist 2005) Blue Revolution Racing(dead link, leave for history) BYUc (New team 2007) Blue Team (finalist 2004; semi-finalist 2005) CarOLO Cornell DARPA Team (finalist 2005) CyberRider (semi-finalist 2004, 2005) Desert Buckeyes (2004,finalist 2005) FutureNowa Grand Challenge Autonomous Race Team Gray Team (finisher 2005) The Golem Group (finalist 2004, 2005)

Highlander Racing Insight Racing (semi-finalist 2004; finalist 2005) KNetX Maximum Exposure (dead link, leave for history) Mech I.Q. (dead link, leave for history) MonsterMoto JackBot (finalist 2005) MITRE Meteorites (finalist 2005) Oregon WAVE (semi-finalist 2005) The Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors (finalist 2004; semi-finalist 2005) Princeton University (finalist 2005) The Prodigies Red Team (finalist 2004; finisher 2005) Red Team Too (finisher 2005) ROVER SYSTEMS (semi-finalist 2004) R Junk Works Stanford Racing Team (winner 2005) Sting Racing at Georgia Tech (new team 2007) SciAutonics (finalist 2004, 2005) SciAutonics II (finalist 2004) Tartan Racing (New CMU Team) Team 1010Delta (dead link, leave for history) Team Aggie Spirit - UC Davis (dead link, leave for history) Team Arctic Tortoise (semi-finalist 2004) Team Blue Revolution (dead link, leave for history) Team CajunBot (finalist 2004, 2005)

Team Tormenta (semi-finalist 2005) Team Cal Poly Team Caltech (finalist 2004, 2005) Team Case (Combined with Team ENSCO) Team CIMAR (finalist 2004, 2005) Team Cybernet (2007 Site Visit Qualified) Team ENSCO (finalist 2004, 2005) Team Go It Alone Team Jefferson (semi-finalist 2005) Team Mexico (new team 2007) Team Overbot (semi-finalist 2004, 2005) Team Rambo (dead link, leave for history) Team Remote-I Team Scorpion Team South Carolina (dead link, leave for history) Team Terramax (finalist 2004; finisher 2005) Team Thunderbird - UBC Team Underdawg Team Visionary Endeavor -- Fox Valley Technical College UCF Team Knightrider Viva Las Vegas (dead link, leave for history) Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team Rocky (finalist 2005) Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team Cliff (finalist 2004, 2005)

TV & Video coverage

• NOVA: The Great Robot Race
• Pre-event videos of the competitors
• WMV Video showing the world through Stanley's laser-beam eyes.

Press Coverage

• The Register: Final robot grunts picked for $1million DARPA race
• The Register: DARPA's Grand Challenge proves to be too grand
• CNN.com: Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge
• SFGate.com: Robot race suffers quick, ignoble end
• 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge Image Gallery
• 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge in Spanish
• Journal of Field Robotics, Special Issue on DARPA Grand Challenge, Part 1
• Journal of Field Robotics, Special Issue on DARPA Grand Challenge, Part 2
• News from the qualifying events and team blogs
• Wired Magazine article on the DARPA Grand Challenge and Stanley.
• Popular Mechanics article on the DARPA Grand Challenge.
• Popular Science article on the DARPA Grand Challenge.
• Scientific American article on the DARPA Grand Challenge.
• NOVA: The Great Robot Race

References