From Darpa Grand Challenge 2004Clash of the Headless Humvees

Perched on a lush and moneyed peninsula south of L.A. airport, Palos Verdes High fell victim in the '90s to low Baby Boomer birth rates and only reopened two years ago; it has yet to spawn a senior class. That the Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors are attempting to put together a Grand Challenge team makes them rich fodder for local newspaper human-interest features; just close your eyes and you can see the trailer for the inevitable Disney coming-of-age weepie about kids who dared to dream. But by virtue of having made the final cut of 25 teams invited to the qualifying trials, they've also become, by DARPA fiat, a bona fide contender. "Now we have to show that we're not a joke, that we belong in the same league as CMU and Caltech," says team leader Graham Robertson, a PV science teacher and a ruddy-faced, unstoppably keen Australian. "But you know, I think nothing is beyond the range of a nerdy high school kid. The algorithms for detecting obstacles, the decisions on the sensors, it's all been kid-driven."




The project began last April when Robertson collected a few of the tech-minded kids to talk about forming a ham radio club. The conversation drifted to GPS navigation, and one of the kids, Joe Bebel, then a 15-year-old freshman, brought up the Grand Challenge, early news of which had just reached his mother, Alice Parker, an electrical engineering professor at USC. Ham radio didn't stand a chance.




A Sunday-afternoon team meeting in a Spanish-colonial-style PV classroom is a disorienting experience. The average age of the somewhat distracted-looking kids milling around the blackboards and school tables is about 15. The parents in attendance have the concerned expressions of adults brought in to discuss their children's academic shortcomings. But the ever-hearty Mr. Robertson gives Bebel a friendly nod: "Hey, Joe, are you thinking about that 'vision problem'? It's never been done, you know." In this upside-down world, he might as well be clapping the back of the high school quarterback on whose varsity-jacketed shoulders rests the outcome of the big game. Bebel wrote much of the technical papers that transformed the Road Warriors from a cute idea into a runaway train -- and the rest
he described in conceptual terms to his
mother, who translated it into high-level programming-ese and ran it by the USC comp sci department for good measure. "But Joe is really the brains behind the team," Alice Parker says emphatically.




The thought occurs, and not for the first time: Is this any way to run the nation's defense?




Actually, the Road Warriors can't quite decide how to run themselves. Many
of the students -- and Alice Parker most
vociferously -- want the kids to march to their own autonomous drumbeat, even if race deadlines are missed in the process. "My goal is to keep this from being 'Dad's science project,'" Parker says. Other parents, mostly corporate engineers and managers, aren't averse to importing grown-up technology if that will enhance the team's chance of making it to the Big Show. "When the kids need to know things, the world's experts are brought in," Greg Larson, PV parent and top Boeing engineer, tells me. "Because they tend to be their neighbors or their parents."




Bebel, a likeable old soul with a flair for diplomacy, parses the issue this way: "Once we've got something built, then it will be easier to have an adult mentor take on a bigger role without jeopardizing the students. As long as we can still say the students did the hardest part, that would still be very impressive."






When Anthony Levandowski first heard about the Grand Challenge, he knew it was for him, even though he
hadn't a clue what sort of design he would bring to the table. Returning to Berkeley from the February '03 conference in L.A. where DARPA first officially announced the race, he had an epiphany. "I was driving out of the mountains," he recalls, "and this pack of motorcycles comes barreling at me and literally splits around me, as rushing water would split around a rock. Right then, I decided this would be the right way to do things."




An autonomous motorcycle? Levandowski had found a way to take the extremely difficult and make it nearly impossible.




In his methodical way, Levandowski can tick off the theoretical advantages of the motorcycle. It's light, tough, agile and at higher speeds very stable -- "the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B in a dense forest," he says. In the big off-road races like Paris to Dakar or Baja, motorcycles race four-wheel vehicles to a rough draw, and the only reason they don't run away with it is because of "rider fatigue," obviously not an issue in autonomous racing. Great. The problem is, as everybody knows, a motorcycle without a rider has a tendency to fall down.




There are solutions to this problem, and Levandowski is working hard at them, so hard in fact that every theoretical issue not related to basic locomotion -- perception, pathfinding, navigation -- is getting the most expedient quick-fix treatment possible. From a competition point of view, this approach is insane, which he readily admits. "Why two wheels?" he says. "At some level, I still don't have a good answer."




At least not an engineering answer. "I always wanted to have an off-road motorcycle as a kid," he says. But growing up in Brussels, Belgium, the son of a divorced French bureaucrat mother, wasn't really conducive to California-style off-road pursuits. Even when he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to live with his American father and remake himself as an American teenager, he remained a studious, disciplined kid. The best explanation for Levandowski's magnificent two-wheeled obsession is that no one's ever gone this way before. "I think it's just my personality," he says. "I feel the need to be different, not by dying my hair blue but by coming up with more interesting ways of doing things. After I've shown that something can be done, then I'm no longer interested. That's bad, but I'm trying to be honest."




A lanky 6 feet 6, Levandowski projects an athletic grace (as a Berkeley undergrad, he was on both the crew and the volleyball teams) and a Continental self-assurance. He bought his tidy, pleasant house "with judicious planning," he says, in part with earnings from various Internet sideline ventures. He's structured his Grand Challenge Blue Team in a similar spirit of canny enterprise. Levandowski pays the bills, and he owns all the intellectual-property rights, even to work designed by his mostly young, undergraduate teammates. They labor, with varying degrees of diligence, not for course credit or money, but because Levandowski is a persuasive salesman and an autonomous motorcycle is a cool thing. "With no rewards, it is hard to apply pressure," he admits. "My biggest challenge is to come up with a rebuttal to, 'Oh, I had midterms last week.'"