Flash
back to October 8, 2005: Stanford Racing Team's Stanley—a
tweaked VW Touareg with robotic innards—kicks up a cloud of
triumphal dust as it crosses the finish line at the DARPA Grand
Challenge in Primm, Nevada. Stanley was the first of four unmanned
vehicles that day to complete a 132-mile desert course replete with
rocks, treacherous inclines, and cliff-side hairpin turns. Though
Stanford's team grabbed the $2 million top prize, the event
represented a collective victory for autonomous vehicle developers.
After Stanley and its cohorts proved their mettle, self-driving cars
started to seem less like a Jetsons-inspired pipe dream and more like
the automotive wave of the future.

DARPA
is upping the real-world ante with this year's Urban Challenge, held
in Victorville, Calif. The field of 11 robotic finalists won't just
need to steer, turn, and brake successfully to navigate the 60-mile
course; they'll also have to obey traffic laws and signals, negotiate
merges on lane-marked roads, and carry out simulated battlefield
supply missions. The race organizers' immediate objectives are
military—Congress has pledged to replace one-third of its
operational ground fleet with autonomous vehicles by 2015—but if
this year's entrants can pull off bravura performances, the civilian
implications will be enormous. Robotics engineers envision a new
generation of computerized cars that will redefine the term
autopilot, ferrying passengers unassisted from point A to point
B, maintaining ideal speed at all times, and braking for dogs and
bikes faster than any human driver ever could.

The
first vehicle to complete the course will win $2 million, and second-
and third-place finishers will bank $1 million and $500,000
respectively. Flag fall will take place at 8 am Pacific time
tomorrow—stay tuned for up-to-the-minute live coverage of the race.—Elizabeth Svoboda

Blinding rain. Careening traffic. Distracted drivers. There are lots of reasons why car crashes are America's leading cause of accidental death. And one way that most accidents could be prevented: with cars that predict a coming collision-and take action to stop it.

Sebastian Thrun isn't watching the road when his driverless Volkswagen SUV veers off-course and heads for a 50-foot precipice. He's in the backseat looking at a laptop that's tracking the car's brain, which consists of seven Pentium processors. When he feels the car swerve abruptly to the left, Thrun looks up, pushes aside a bundle of cables blocking his view, and realizes that his car is about to pull a Thelma and Louise.

In this, the fifth of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous-vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday, October 8, near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at the Red Team's next-generation Hummer, which features a sophisticated system of integrated sensors. Stay tuned to popsci.comfor more previews throughout the week and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

In this, the fourth of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous-vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday, October 8, near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at Stanford's entry, affectionately dubbed Stanley, which is designed to automatically choose the best route. Stay tuned to popsci.com for more previews throughout the week and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

In this, the fourth of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous-vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday, October 8, near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at the Virginia Tech team's two entries, each of which takes a different approach to the problem. Stay tuned to popsci.com for more previews throughout the week and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

Virginia Tech Team
Blacksburg, Virginia

In this, the second of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous-vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday, October 8, near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at Team DAD's Toyota truck, equipped with an innovative laser-based navigation system. Stay tuned to popsci.com for more previews throughout the week and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

Team DAD (Digital Auto Drive)

In this, the first of a series, Popular Science profiles one of the favored teams competing to win the Darpa Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle race, which will take place on Saturday (October 8) near Primm, Nevada. Today we look at the Blue Team's autonomous motorcycle. Stay tuned to popsci.com for more previews throughout the week, and for minute-by-minute videos and updates on race day.

The Blue Team
University of California at Berkeley and Texas A&M

Many of PopSci's Brilliant 10-scientists who are pushing the limits of their disciplines-labor in abstract realms, generating calculations, analyses and other intangibles. But a couple of them work very much in the here and now, even risking their own safety when necessary.

Maydianne Andrade, 35, a biologist at the University of Toronto, studies the mating habits of Australian redback spiders, and keeps hundreds of these poisonous critters in her lab. She and her colleagues made the following video, which shows a pair of redbacks in flagrante.

Here’s something that engineers designing the next generation of
unmanned combat air vehicles may not have considered: A well-placed lightning strike could rewire the plane’s artificially intelligent (AI) brain, transforming the craft into an enemy of the state bent on destroying a major city. Absurd? Maybe. Good plot for a thriller? Evidently: It’s the source of the action in the new movie Stealth, in which an AI-controlled fighter jet turns evil.

This October Carnegie Mellon University will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its renowned Robotics Institute and welcome a few new members into its Robot Hall of Fame. The fact that two of this year’s inductees—Astroboy and C3PO—are imaginary is typical in a field that lingers somewhere between science and fiction. One of the ultimate goals for roboticists, a machine that’s as easy to talk to as a human, is still

When racecar engineers dream of a perfect world, they don’t imagine Britney Spears disrobing from a Sparco fire suit. What they fantasize about is a universe without the prima donnas behind the steering wheels. "The driver is not your friend," says Kia Cammaerts, who creates racing simulations."Because unless he's [world champion] Michael Schumacher, all he's doing is slowing the car down." So would engineers ever attempt an automotive version of Deep Blue, the supercomputer that in 1997 humbled chess champ Garry Kasparov?

When last we visited with the men and women, the boys and girls, the Red Teams and Blue Teams and Road Warriors of the DARPA Grand Challenge off-road robotics race, back in March, we signed off on a note of authentic ambivalence. The teams themselves were all over the map, from rehearsing victory speeches to praying they would pass the qualifying round and be allowed on to what was anticipated to be a 210-mile course from outside Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert to somewhere just west of Vegas.

In March, in the desert between Barstow, California, and Las Vegas, the DARPA Grand Challenge -- where autonomous vehicles must navigate themselves without any input from human handlers -- will make its dusty debut. For our March 2004 issue, writer Joe Hooper profiled some of the groups developing vehicles for the event. PopSci staff photographer John B. Carnett captured some of the trials and tribulations of Grand Challenge hopefuls on film. Here are some of the images that didn't make it into the magazine but that Carnett found particularly interesting.