DARPA Grand Challenge
In plain wordsA series of US government-sponsored races for driverless vehicles held in 2004, 2005 and 2007. No robot finished the first race; within three years, cars were navigating mock city traffic.
A series of prize competitions for autonomous ground vehiclesautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving. organized by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the first, on 13 March 2004, over roughly 140 miles of the Mojave Desert, no vehicle finished; the best, Carnegie Mellon University's Sandstorm, covered about 7.3 miles. In the second, on 8 October 2005, five vehicles completed a 132-mile desert course, and Stanford University's Stanley, led by Sebastian Thrun, won the $2 million prize by combining lidarlidar, n.: A sensor that measures distances by firing laser pulses and timing their reflections, building a 3D picture of its surroundings out of millions of points; widely used on robots and self-driving cars., cameras and GPS with machine learningmachine learning, n.: A way of building software that learns from examples instead of following rules written by a programmer. Shown thousands of labeled photos, for instance, a program can learn to recognize cats. for judging drivable terrain. The 2007 Urban Challenge, on a mock town course at the former George Air Force Base in California, required obeying traffic rules among other vehicles; Carnegie Mellon's Boss won. Veterans of these teams went on to lead self-driving programs at Google (later Waymo), Uber and elsewhere.
The DARPA Grand Challenge turned the self-driving car from a defense curiosity into an industry.
Origin
Created by DARPA in response to a US congressional goal, set in 2000, that a third of operational ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015. Its prize format inspired later DARPA contests in robotics and cybersecurity.
Related
- autonomous vehicleautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving.
- Strategic Computing InitiativeStrategic Computing Initiative, prop. n.: A billion-dollar US defense research program, run from 1983 to 1993, that tried to build machine intelligence for military uses such as self-driving vehicles and assistants for fighter pilots.
- lidarlidar, n.: A sensor that measures distances by firing laser pulses and timing their reflections, building a 3D picture of its surroundings out of millions of points; widely used on robots and self-driving cars.
- roboticsrobotics, n.: The science and engineering of building robots and making them work: designing their bodies, sensors and motors, and writing the software that lets them see, plan and move safely.
- machine learningmachine learning, n.: A way of building software that learns from examples instead of following rules written by a programmer. Shown thousands of labeled photos, for instance, a program can learn to recognize cats.
Sources
- Thrun, S. et al. (2006). Stanley: The Robot that Won the DARPA Grand Challenge. Journal of Field Robotics 23(9), 661–692.
Mentioned in
autonomous vehicleautonomous vehicle, n.: A vehicle, usually a car, truck or shuttle, that can drive itself, sensing the road, deciding what to do and steering, braking and accelerating with no human driving., DARPADARPA, prop. n.: The US military's research-funding agency, which paid for much of the early development of artificial intelligence and the internet and runs prize competitions such as driverless-car races., WaymoWaymo, prop. n.: A company owned by Google's parent, Alphabet, that runs fully driverless robotaxi services in several American cities., Sebastian ThrunSebastian Thrun, prop. n.: A German-American roboticist who led the Stanford team that won the 2005 desert race for self-driving cars, started Google's self-driving car project, and founded the online-learning company Udacity., Strategic Computing InitiativeStrategic Computing Initiative, prop. n.: A billion-dollar US defense research program, run from 1983 to 1993, that tried to build machine intelligence for military uses such as self-driving vehicles and assistants for fighter pilots.