Fifteen robot vehicles took off across the Mojave Desert starting at dawn on Saturday, dodging boulders and tortoises in search of a place in scientific history and US$1 million in Pentagon cash.
The 228km race over some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon's own skunk works that spawned the Internet, the Predator drone and the stealth fighter.
The top qualifier, Red Team Sandstorm, sped out of the starting line at the SlashX ranch, south of Barstow, to the cheers of several thousand spectators, and quickly reached speeds of 32km an hour. Other vehicles followed at five-minute intervals.
PHOTO: EPA
Within an hour, however, the course began to take its toll. Sandstorm, based on an Army surplus Humvee and put together at the robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, was the first casualty, as it veered off course down an embankment. When Sandstorm returned to the course, it burned out a mechanical part.
Shortly afterward, David, the entry from Ensco Incorporated in Falls Church, Virginia, struck a bush and rolled over. The Acura MDX entry from Palos Verdes High School in California failed to make a turn at the start, ran directly into a barrier and was out of the race.
Less than four hours after the race began, all vehicles had either crashed or been demobilized. The most successful robot belonged to the team SciAutomics, based in Thousand Oaks, California. The team was sponsored by Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of off-road vehicles. The SciAutomics vehicle managed to go 12.8km.
No one won the cash prize, which required finishing the course within 10 hours.
The competition, announced a little over a year ago, gave birth to some of the strangest contraptions ever built: computer-laden mechanical monstrosities that began life as golf carts, dune buggies, hybrids, luxury sports utility vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, a motorcycle and a 16-ton military truck.
They went by the names Terrahawk and TerraMax, Ghost Rider and Doom Buggy, Golem and Ladibug, Cliff and Bob. The rules required the vehicles to traverse the difficult course without human intervention. These were meant to be true autonomous vehicles, not remotely piloted machines or drive-by-wire craft like the Predator.
The Pentagon is trying to meet a congressional mandate to convert a third of its battlefield vehicles to autonomous operation by 2015 to save soldiers' lives.
Major military contractors and computer companies backed some of the teams, but others had only their children's inheritances and hundreds of hours of sweat equity behind them.
The trials last week gave a preview of what was to come on Saturday. Some machines would not start, and some drove in circles like dogs chasing their tails.
The only motorcycle wobbled 9m and flopped on its side. The driverless vehicles routinely ran over warning cones and slammed into concrete barriers and vehicles that had been placed along the course as obstacles. Even the most perfect trial ended its run by knocking into a barrier it was supposed to sense and avoid.
The race attracted an assortment of dreamers, hucksters and high school hackers, off-road racers and BattleBot warriors, crackpots and visionaries.
The project manager for DARPA is a straight-arrow Air Force colonel, but the contestants "are a marriage of the geeks and the greaseballs," as one of the organizers put it.
The teams devoted the better part of a year and spent US$10,000 to US$3.5 million to produce their entries. For most contestants, the prize money was a small part of the incentive.
"I don't think the money is the motivation," said Anthony Tether, DARPA's director. "It has sparked an interest in science and technology in this country that we haven't seen since the 1960s with the Apollo program."
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS