DARPA Grand Challenge (2007)

Last updated
A vehicle being developed for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge ElementBlack2.jpg
A vehicle being developed for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge

The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge [1] was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logistics Airport), in Victorville, California (Google map), in the West of the United States. [2] Discovery's Science channel followed a few of the teams and covered the Urban Challenge in its Robocars Archived 2008-07-30 at the Wayback Machine series. [3]

Contents

Overview

The $2 million winner was Tartan Racing, a collaborative effort by Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors Corporation, with their vehicle "Boss", a heavily modified Chevrolet Tahoe. The second-place finisher earning the $1 million prize was the Stanford Racing Team with their entry "Junior", a 2006 Volkswagen Passat. Coming in third place was team Victor Tango from Virginia Tech winning the $500,000 prize with their 2005 Ford Escape hybrid, "Odin". [2]

The course involved a 96 kilometres (60 mi) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules included obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. While the 2004 and 2005 events were more physically challenging for the vehicles, the robots operated in isolation and did not encounter other vehicles on the course, the Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other vehicles on the course; other competing robots and human professional drivers occupied the course. [4] This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection. [5]

The advantages of this technology are potentially enormous. Well-coordinated fully automatic driving will be much more efficient, with reduction in traffic jams and road accidents, which cost trillions per year in the US alone. Efficiency will also reduce energy consumption and thus pollution and climate change.

Unlike the past two challenges, DARPA announced that some teams were to receive development funding, based on proposals submitted to DARPA. Eleven teams could receive up to US$1 million a piece under this special program track (Track A). [6] These 11 teams largely represent major universities and large corporate interests such as CMU teaming with GM, Stanford and Braunschweig University of Technology teaming with Volkswagen, Virginia Tech teaming with Torc Robotics, Oshkosh Truck, Honeywell, Raytheon, Caltech, Autonomous Solutions, Cornell, and MIT. One of the few independent entries in Track A was the Golem Group.

Basic rules for 2007

Initial site visits

In June/July 2007, 53 teams (see list below) were notified that they qualified for DARPA Site visits. Those teams that were successful in these evaluations moved on to a national qualifying event that took place in October 2007.

Semi-finalists

On August 9, 2007, after completing the site visits, DARPA announced [7] the 36 semi-finalists selected to participate in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) that took place October 26–31, 2007. Originally, the top 20 teams from that event were scheduled to proceed to the final competition on November 3, however only 11 teams were selected. The 36 semifinalists were:

National Qualification Event

Diagram of qualification area A AreaA.svg
Diagram of qualification area A

The National Qualification Event for the 2007 challenge occurred between October 26 and 31, 2007. 35 teams were selected to participate in this semifinal round. The qualifying rounds included 3 areas: A, B, and C. Area A was a test of the robots' ability to merge. A 2-way loop of human traffic (provided by professional stunt drivers) surrounded a one-way road running from one side of the loop to the other. Robots had to go from the one-way road, make a left turn into traffic, follow the loop 180 degrees, and make another left turn onto the one-way road again. Robots were free to make as many laps as they could in the allotted time. Area B was mostly closed to spectators except for the start and finish, and involved the robots navigating a long suburban route demonstrating parking, navigation, and avoiding stalled cars along the way. Area B was part of the final event course. In Area C, robots performed several loops into two 4-way intersections in order to test their implementation of 4-way stops. Each loop, human drivers would provide a progressively more difficult intersection situation. At some points in Area C, roads would be blocked to test robots' ability to re-plan routes.

On November 1, 2007 it was announced that there would be only 11 teams competing in the Urban Challenge. [2] [8] The 11 teams selected to compete were the following:

  1. AnnieWay
  2. Ben Franklin
  3. Team CarOLO
  4. Cornell
  5. Intelligent Vehicle Systems
  6. MIT
  7. Stanford Racing
  8. Tartan Racing
  9. Team Oshkosh
  10. Team UCF
  11. Victor Tango

DARPA's reasoning for only qualifying 11 teams was primarily safety-related. DARPA felt that since there would be real humans near the robots in the traffic cars as well as DARPA officials scoring robot performance, safety was paramount. [9]

Teams were given sparsely defined waypoints charting the course for the robocars to follow. However, other teams generated a detailed map of the qualifications tracks. A debriefing published by one of the teams illustrated graphically the course it was given by DARPA contrasted against the course used by the winning team. [10]

Finals

Stanford Racing and Victor Tango together at an intersection in the DARPA Urban Challenge Finals UrbanChallenge StandfordRacingandVictorTango.JPG
Stanford Racing and Victor Tango together at an intersection in the DARPA Urban Challenge Finals

Starting Area: 34°35′05″N117°22′08″W / 34.5846°N 117.369°W / 34.5846; -117.369 [11]

The final event for the DARPA Urban Challenge took place on November 3, 2007, and included all 11 teams which made it past the semi-final National Qualification Event. The event was broadcast on a live webcast via the DARPA Urban Challenge website, narrated by Marty Reid (racing sportscaster) and Grant Imahara (of MythBusters acclaim), with "sideline reporting" by Jamie Hyneman (also of Mythbusters). [2]

The final event consisted of three missions, approximately 55 miles (89 km) in total, given to each team. A team's score for each mission was computed by taking the total time taken to complete the mission, and adding and subtracting penalties and bonuses. Penalties were assessed for excessive delay, violating traffic rules, exhibiting dangerous behavior, etc. Vehicles were frequently manually paused for safety reasons; if a vehicle was not the root cause of such a pause then the duration of the pause was not counted in its final score. In order to officially complete the race, a vehicle's adjusted time for the three missions must be under six hours. [12]

Six autonomous vehicle teams finished the event; Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Ben Franklin Racing, MIT, and Cornell. On November 4, CMU's Boss was named the winner, followed by Stanford's Junior, then Virginia Tech's Odin, and MIT's Talos. [13] Final adjusted scores for the six vehicles were not announced.

Race participants and results

Team NameID#TrackVehicleTypeTeam LocationTime Taken
(h:m:s)		Result
Tartan Racing 19ABoss2007 Chevrolet Tahoe Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 4:10:201st Place; averaged approximately 14 miles per hour throughout the course [14] [15]
Stanford Racing 03AJunior2006 Volkswagen Passat Wagon Stanford University, Palo Alto, California 4:29:282nd Place; averaged about 13.7 miles per hour (22.0 km/h) throughout the course [14] [16]
VictorTango 32 [17] AOdin2005 Ford Hybrid Escape Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia 4:36:383rd Place; averaged slightly less than 13 miles per hour (21 km/h) throughout the course [14]
MIT 79ATalosLand Rover LR3 (2004–08) MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts Approx. 6 hours4th Place. [18]
The Ben Franklin Racing Team 74BLittle Ben2006 Toyota Prius University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Over 6 hour limitOne of 6 teams to finish course
Cornell 26ASkynet2007 Chevrolet Tahoe Cornell University, Ithaca, New York Over 6 hour limitOne of 6 teams to finish course
Team CarOLO 62BCaroline2006 Volkswagen Passat Braunschweig, Germany DNFEliminated fifth during mission one of the finals.

Pulled after a collision head on in traffic circle, while turning right but being damaged by the opponent.

Team UCF 13BKnight Rider1996 Subaru Outback Legacy 4WD University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida DNFEliminated fourth during mission one. Vehicle vs building incident [19]
Team Oshkosh 21ATerraMaxMarine Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR) Oshkosh, Wisconsin DNFEliminated third during mission one. Vehicle vs building incident [19]
Honeywell/Intelligent Vehicle Systems 15AXAV-250Ford F-250 (2004–2008) Troy, MI – Dearborn, MI – Minneapolis, MN DNFEliminated first or second during mission one. Froze at intersection [19]
AnnieWay Archived 2014-01-16 at the Wayback Machine 54BAnnieWAYPassat Variant 2.0 FSI (2005–2008) Karlsruhe, Germany DNFEliminated first or second during mission one. Froze at entrance to traffic circle [19]


Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science</span> School for computer science in the United States

The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2022 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for second with Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked second in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots, and new Challenges are still being conceived. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge was tasked with building robotic teams to autonomously map, navigate, and search subterranean environments. Such teams could be useful in exploring hazardous areas and in search and rescue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stanley (vehicle)</span> Autonomous car

Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sebastian Thrun</span> German-American entrepreneur

Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Whittaker</span> American robotisict

William L. "Red" Whittaker is an American roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, placing second and third place simultaneously in the Grand Challenge Races.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robot competition</span>

A robot competition is an event where the abilities and characteristics of robots may be tested and assessed. Usually they have to outperform other robots in order to win the competition. Many competitions are for schools but several competitions with professional and hobbyist participants also exist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DARPA Grand Challenge (2004)</span> First DARPA Grand Challenge

Announced in 2002, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless car competition held on March 13, 2004 in the Mojave Desert region of the United States. The 150 miles (240 km) route followed Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California-Nevada border in Primm. None of the robot vehicles finished the route. The vehicle of Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team traveled the farthest distance, completing 11.78 km (7.32 mi) of the course. The $1 million prize remained unclaimed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DARPA Grand Challenge (2005)</span> Second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge

The second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was a 212 km (132 mi) off-road course that began at 6:40 am on October 8, 2005, near the California/Nevada state line. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.32 mi) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race. Five vehicles successfully completed the course:

There are a number of competitions and prizes to promote research in artificial intelligence.

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Leonard is a researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

Henrik Iskov Christensen is a Danish roboticist and Professor of Computer Science at Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. He is also the Director of the Contextual Robotics Institute at UC San Diego.

CajunBot refers to the autonomous ground vehicles developed by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for the DARPA Grand Challenges. CajunBot was featured on CNN and on the Discovery Channel science series Robocars.

The Learning Applied to Ground Vehicles (LAGR) program, which ran from 2004 until 2008, had the goal of accelerating progress in autonomous, perception-based, off-road navigation in robotic unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). LAGR was funded by DARPA, a research agency of the United States Department of Defense.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Robotics Engineering Center</span> Operating unit within the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University

The National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) is an operating unit within the Robotics Institute (RI) of Carnegie Mellon University. NREC works closely with government and industry clients to apply robotic technologies to real-world processes and products, including unmanned vehicle and platform design, autonomy, sensing and image processing, machine learning, manipulation, and human–robot interaction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of self-driving cars</span> Overview of the history of self-driving cars

Experiments have been conducted on self-driving cars since 1939; promising trials took place in the 1950s and work has proceeded since then. The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab and ALV projects in 1984 and Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's Eureka Prometheus Project in 1987. Since then, numerous major companies and research organizations have developed working autonomous vehicles including Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Continental Automotive Systems, Autoliv Inc., Bosch, Nissan, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Vislab from University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. In July 2013, Vislab demonstrated BRAiVE, a vehicle that moved autonomously on a mixed traffic route open to public traffic.

Roborace was a competition with autonomously driving, electrically powered vehicles. Founded in 2015 by Denis Sverdlov, it aimed to be the first global championship for autonomous cars. From 2017 to 2019, the official CEO was 2016–17 Formula E champion, Lucas Di Grassi, who later became a member of Roborace’s supervisory board. The series tested their technology and race formats at FIA Formula E Championship events during 2016–2018. In 2019 Roborace organized Season Alpha, which consisted of 4 trial racing events with several independent teams competing against each other for the first time. In 2020–21 Roborace held Season Beta with 7 competing teams. All teams utilized the same chassis and powertrain, but they had to develop their own real-time computing algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies.

Ragunathan "Raj" Rajkumar is the George Westinghouse Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also affiliated with the Robotics Institute and the Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He also serves as the Director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute and as the Director of the Mobility21 USDOT National University Transportation Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He also leads the General Motors-CMU Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Laboratory (CAD-CRL), and the Real-Time and Multimedia Systems Lab (RTML) there.

Torc Robotics (Torc), an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck, is an American autonomous truck company headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, with operations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Austin, Texas; and Stuttgart, Germany. Torc is testing autonomous trucks in Virginia, New Mexico, and Texas and is taking a pure play approach to commercialization – focusing at first on one platform in one region.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Urmson</span> CEO of self-driving technology company Aurora

Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He cofounded Aurora Innovation, a company developing self-driving technology, in 2017 and serves as its CEO. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.

Over the years, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted a number of prize competitions to spur innovations. A prize competition allows DARPA to establish an ambitious goal, which makes way for novel approaches from the public that might otherwise appear too risky to undertake by experts in a particular discipline.

References

  1. ↑ "The contest, called the Grand Challenge and sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, featured both robot collisions and robot traffic jams." John Markoff (2007-11-05). "Crashes and Traffic Jams in Military Test of Robotic Vehicles". The New York Times .
  2. 1 2 3 4 Welcome Archived 2007-10-31 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ↑ "Robocars". IMDb.com. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  4. ↑ "Welcome". Archived from the original on 2014-03-05. Retrieved 2014-01-08.
  5. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-10-31. Retrieved 2007-11-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  6. ↑ "DARPA Announces Track A Participants for 2007 Urban Challenge" (PDF). DARPA. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-10-24. Retrieved 2015-02-11.
  7. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-10-31. Retrieved 2007-11-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. ↑ "TG Daily - DARPA only allows 11 teams into the Urban Challenge". Tgdaily.com. Archived from the original on 19 September 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  9. ↑ "TG Daily - Video: "We really don't know what they're going to do" – DARPA Urban Challenge head". Tgdaily.com. Archived from the original on 19 September 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  10. ↑ "Team Jefferson 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge Debrief" (PDF). Team Jefferson. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-02-11.
  11. ↑ "DARPA Grand Challenge Site Resources page". Archived from the original on 6 October 2007. Retrieved 1 October 2007.
  12. ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-11-21. Retrieved 2007-11-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  13. ↑ "MIT finishes fourth in DARPA challenge for robotic vehicles". News.mit.edu. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  14. 1 2 3 Belfiore, Michael (November 4, 2007). "Carnegie Takes First in DARPA's Urban Challenge". Wired.
  15. ↑ "First-Place Finish - Carnegie Mellon University". Cmu.edu. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  16. ↑ "Stanford Racing Team". Cs.stanford.edu. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  17. ↑ The Virginia Tech robot carried number 32 to commemorate the thirty-two people killed in the campus massacre on April 16, 2007 .
  18. ↑ "Contact". Darpa.mil. Archived from the original on 26 December 2007. Retrieved 22 June 2019.
  19. 1 2 3 4 Belfiore, Michael (November 3, 2007). "3 Teams Out of the Running at Auto-Bot Race – Danger Room from Wired.com". Archived from the original on November 6, 2007.

Commons-logo.svg Media related to DARPA Urban Challenge 2007 at Wikimedia Commons

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.