Live Reports from the 2005 Darpa Grand Challenge

10-08-2005 at 04:04 AM Primm, Nevada

As the sun rises over Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, Nevada on October 8, 23 unmanned robotic vehicles will rumble over a starting line drawn in sand just beyond the parking lot. A $2 million grand prize awaits the first entrant to complete the grueling 150-mile desert course, guaranteed to be replete with potholes, rocks, and hairpin turns. At T minus 12 hours, onlookers might expect to see programmers and mechanics making frantic preparations †especially considering that no vehicle in last year's race made it more than 7 miles before breaking down.

For many of the competing teams, however, the last hours before the race are dead time, not do-or-die time. Virginia Tech team member Patrick Currier doesn't plan on getting much sleep tonight, but he won't stay up making last-minute tweaks. He and his teammates will just be babysitting their vehicle, Rocky, as its switched-on engine idles all night long. This way, he explains, they can avoid the havoc a restart might wreak with the vehicle's GPS system. "We'll just be sitting here all night, playing cards and sleeping in shifts," he says.

Tonight, the entire tent city bordering the starting line is emitting laid-back vibes. Many team members are spending the evening celebrating in a barbecue tent with a lavishly-appointed open bar, the air thick with grill smoke and conversation. They're not blowing off the race, they just realize that-after spending 16-hour days in from of computer screens, logging thousands of miles on practice courses, and breezing through last week's qualification event-it's time to take a rest. Like Olympic coaches watching their athletes line up at the blocks, all they can do is wait, sit back, and find out what their protgs are capable of. "This event is almost an anticlimax for a lot of us here," says Nick Miller, who helped build the highly-touted H1ghlander bot for Carnegie Mellon's Red Team Too. "All the hard work was in the development, and that was done months ago."
That doesn't mean teams have lost sight of the pitfalls waiting for them on race day. For starters, the course layout will remain a mystery until two and a half hours before the start of the race, when teams will receive a CD with the course route and insert it into their racers' computers. Though the teams have spent months fine-tuning the programs that determine how the robots attack the desert terrain, the vehicles must run completely unassisted once they leave the gate.

To win, the teams must also cover the obstacle-laden 150-mile course in under 10 hours, averaging a relatively speedy 15 miles per hour in territory better suited to mules than trucks. Each vehicle will approach this task differently, and the Red Team's emphasis will be on traveling as fast as the course allows. "We'll look at the speed limits of the course," says Chris Urmson, one of Miller's teammates. "We want to go slow enough to finish, but fast enough to win." But with high speed comes a greater risk of crashing, and some teams plan to go slow and steady rather than just bombing along. "We're taking the tortoise and the hare approach," Currier says. "We're the tortoise. If we win, it's because someone else wrecked at 25 miles per hour."

All the teams here have faced off at least four times in the qualifying races leading up to the Grand Challenge, so they know each other's entries-and each other-well. When asked what advantage rival Stanford Racing Team may have over his Red Team entry Sandstorm, Urmson pointed to Thrun's bright blue logo-covered race jersey and quipped, "Stanford has a little more fashion sense."

Tomorrow's race guarantees excitement, clouds of dust, and probably at least one appearance from a tow truck. But during this sunset barbeque, most teams wait calmly, knowing their job is done and that it's all up to the robots now. "On race day it's sit back and watch the show," Miller says. "We turn it on, and it should run just like a washing machine."