Live Reports from the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge

Pole Positions

10-08-2005 at 06:12 AM PDT

The final route for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was unveiled just two hours before the Opening Ceremonies this morning. This year's course-about 132 miles-will be markedly more difficult than last year's, featuring several narrow roads, hairpin turns, low-hanging brush, three tunnels and at least one 100-foot drop off.
In order to win the $2 million prize, the vehicles can't stray from the course and must finish in 10 hours or less. Besides staying on course and following speed limits in tortoise-crossing zones, the only rule is that the vehicles must be fully autonomous, relying only on their navigational equipment to finish the race. No remote controls allowed!
The field of 23 was whittled down from an original field of 195 applicants through a series of tests and qualifying runs. Fifteen states will be represented today, with entries hailing from 17 universities and colleges and one high school.

2005 Finalists and Starting Positions
To prevent any major disaster right at the start, officials will be sending the vehicles off in five minute intervals.

1 - #25 Red Team Too †H1ghlander (Pittsburgh, PA)

2 - #03 Stanford Racing Team †Stanford Roadrunner (Palo Alto, CA)

3 - #19 Red Team Racing †Sandstorm (Pittsburgh, PA)

4 - #23 Axion Racing †Spirit (Westlake Village, CA)

5 - #15 Intelligent Vehicle Safety Systems I †Desert Tortoise (Littleton, CO)

6 - #04 Team DAD †"Dad, are we there yet?" (Morgan Hill, CA)

7 - #18 The Golem Group/UCLA †Golem 2 (Santa Monica, CA)

8 - #26 Team Cornell †Spider (Ithaca, NY)

9 - #41Princeton University †Prospect II (Princeton, NJ)

10 - #28 Team ENSCO †Dexter (Deployable Extreme Terrain Enabled Robot) (Springfield, VA)

11 - #16 MonsterMoto †Jackbot (Cedar Park, TX)

12 - #20 SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering †RASCAL (Robust Autonomous Sensor-Controlled All Terrain Land Vehicle) (Thousand Oaks, CA)

13- #09 Virginia Tech Team Rocky †Rocky (Blacksburg, VA)

14 - #10 Desert Buckeyes †ION (Intelligent Off-road Navigator) (Columbus, OH) 15 - #38 Virginia Tech Grand Challenge Team †Cliff (Blacksburg, VA)

16 - #30 Gray Team †GrayBot (Metairie, LA)

17 - #02 Team Caltech †Alice (Pasadena, CA)

18 - #08 CIMAR †NaviGATOR (Gainesville, FL)

19 - #21 Team TerraMax †TerraMax (OshKosh, WI)

20 - #14 Insight Racing †Desert Rat (Cary, NC)

21 - #01Mojavaton †Xboxx (Grand Junction, CO)

22 - #24 Team CajunBot †Cajunbot (Lafayette, LA)

23 - #37 MITRE Meteorites †The Meteor (McLean, VA)

-Bjorn

Ready To Go

10-08-2005 at 05:57 AM PST

It's half an hour before starting time, and though the sky over Primm hasn't yet started to lighten, excitement is already running high. Team members are hunched intently over their laptops, glowing screens standing out like beacons in the dark parking lot. A pack of Segways weaves aimlessly in and out around the sponsor tents. Everyone's antsy; after keeping vigil over their vehicles through the night, the teams are anxious to get this show on the road.

I haven't gotten my caffeine fix yet, so I struggle to keep my eyes open as Grand Challenge program manager Tom Kurjanowicz lets us in on some details about the previously-secret 132-mile route. After leaving the starting line just outside the casino parking lot, the bots will embark on a loop road with a radius of only a few miles, giving the sleep-deprived spectators in the grandstands ample opportunity for a close-up look at the action.

After completing this initial circuit, the vehicles will strike out to the north-and the course will get a lot hairier. Three tunnels along the route mean the bots will periodically lose GPS capability and be forced to rely only on their camera- or radar-based obstacle detection equipment to find their way around. The final stretch of the course, which the vehicles aren't expected to hit until late afternoon, includes the harrowing Beerbottle Pass--ten-foot-wide dirt roads, clumps of overhanging brush, and a several-hundred-foot dropoff to the left. Kurjanowicz says this year's course will be tougher than last year's by far, and that's saying something, considering no one covered even a tenth of the course's planned distance in '04. Darpa's obviously raised the bar, but will the bots be up to the challenge?

-Elizabeth