DARPA Urban Challenge to Test Robotic Vehicles in the Desert for Defense Department

Eleven teams from universities and private businesses spent their Saturday racing autonomous vehicles around a course set up to simulate an urban environment at a former air force base in California. The DARPA Urban Challenge pits cars and crews against each other under the guise of the Defense Department to find the next generation of robot vehicles.

Tartan Racing took first place with their Chevy Tahoe, "Boss." Stanford followed up their previous win with second place for "Junior", a Volkswagon Touareg, and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango took third with "Odin", a Ford Escape hybrid. First place will be awarded $2 million, with $1 million going to second, and the third place finisher will receive $500,000.

Tartan looked to be the front runner before the winners were announced, coming in at the fastest time. Although Stanford is the favorite being the defending champ and technically came in first (Tartan started out later however), these two teams have a history of coming across the finish line neck and neck. The DARPA results were announced Sunday, November 4, after careful examination of all data.

Six of the eleven teams successfully completed the full course, which is a huge improvement over the 2004 DARPA Challenge in which no vehicle fully navigated the course with no winner announced. Three teams made it in less than the six hours alloted for the course: Stanford Racing Team, Tartan Racing of Carnegie Mellon, and Victor Tango of Virginia Tech. The other three teams that completed the course, but not in six hours, were MIT, Team Cornell, and The Ben Franklin Racing Team of the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University.

The vehicles in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Urban Challenge are not radio- or remote-controlled robot cars, but rather these vehicles are designed to drive themselves with the help of sensors, cameras, GPS and computers. In 2001, the National Defense Authorization Act called for the Defense Department to develop unmanned vehicles for military use. The mandate called for the military to ensure that a third of its ground combat vehicles will be unmanned vehicles by the year 2015. The Urban Challenge is a testing ground for these robot vehicles, and provides valuable experiences for university engineering students, as well as prize money for the schools or businesses that compete.

This year, the third year of the DARPA Challenge, there were eleven vehicles entered in the finals. The vehicles came form such schools as Cornell, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Tech. Other teams were collaborative efforts like the team from the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University. Two international teams came from Germany, and two teams were from Honeywell and Oshkosh, respectively. Many of the university-based teams also had corporate sponsors, such as General Motors, Ford, LandRover, and Lockheed Martin. Many of the teams outfitted sports utility vehicles for the Urban Challenge, and the Virginia Tech team used a hybrid. The Ben Franklin Racing Team used a Toyota Prius hybrid.

The teams had to complete three "missions" in which the vehicles had to successfully maneuver through courses that are much like what an urban battlefield supply run would be. The course in total is 60 miles in length, and the vehicles must drive themselves like normal cars with normal drivers behind the wheel. The vehicle must obey traffic signals and avoid obstacles, and they have six hours to complete the three missions.

The teams had to qualify for today's finals, competing along the way against 89 teams in total. The first round of qualifiers dropped that number to 36 teams, with only eleven making it as far as the final challenge. There were two tracks for teams to enter the competition, Track A and B. Track A competitors applied for up to $1 million in funding through DARPA, whereas Track B did not receive funds. Whether or not the teams were Track A or B had no bearing on the Urban Challenge, as all teams compete on equal footing. Track A funding was a way to ensure that all schools and businesses could compete, regardless of funding.

Stanford won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a course of a desert route over 132 miles. The inaugural Grand Challenge did not have a vehicle finish the race, which that year consisted of a 142-mile desert course. 2007 marks the first year that the course is a simulated urban environment, and thus the name change to the Urban Challenge. The former George Air Force Base is the setting for the Urban Challenge, transformed into three distinct courses.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is an arm of the Department of Defense that works to stimulate basic and applied research. The DARPA mission is "to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from harming our national security."

Source: DARPA Urban Challenge 2007, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency