Your correspondent has not been impressed by urban-based vehicular feats since 2004, when a guy named Singh got me from midtown to JFK in a white-knuckled seventeen minutes; but Saturday's DARPA Urban Challenge was probably a greater achievement.
Vehicles competing in the Urban Challenge will have to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, including robotic vehicles without drivers, and operate safely on the course. The urban setting adds considerable complexity to the challenge faced by the robotic vehicles, and replicates the environments where many of today's military missions are conducted.
To tackle this problem, teams of corporations and colleges bolted everything from Playstation 3s to Mac Minis onto a slew of vehicles outfitted with cameras, GPS units, radars, and the all-important Kill Switch in case SkyNet got into the system. Carnegie-Mellon's Tartan Racing and their bad-ass Chevy Tahoe finished the 55-mile course first, garnering the US $2 mil top prize, and a total of six teams finished the Challenge.
One way in which the Urban Challenge was very different from a Manhattan taxi ride: "None of the winning teams had taken any demerits for traffic violations."
via wired
thanks jerry!
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