DARPA's Urban Challenge has finished, with six of the eleven cars making it across the finishing line. Cars from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Tech were the "winners," taking less than the six hour maximum to complete the 60 mile course which involved avoiding obstacles and fifty cars with human drivers. The overall winner of the $2 million prize has yet to be announced, although were guessing it'll be one of the latter three teams rather than the eight other cars that completed the course. Despite the significant collision potential, there was only one minor fender bender (which didn't even stop the two cars.) That's a far better showing than the first ever "Desert" Challenge in 2004 where not a single car finished.
Since then the number of cars completing has only increased, and with it, the potential for cars that can drive themselves.
UPDATE:
Carnegie Mellon won the $2 Million, with Stanford finishing second for $1 Million, and Virginia Tech third for $500,000.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
RA @ Nov 4th 2007 2:49PM
Only 6 of the 11 cars actually finished the race. You should edit the title.
RA @ Nov 4th 2007 3:41PM
The article you linked to pretty clearly states that a number of the cars did not finish and were pulled from the race.
From the Popular Mechanics article you linked to:
"...when asked exactly why Terramax was pulled from the race, Tether responded, 'Because it was about ready to knock the building down.' Sounds about right."
cmonkey @ Nov 4th 2007 3:45PM
Indeed. Only CMU, Stanford, VT, UPenn/Lehigh, MIT, and Cornell finished the race. The other 5 teams were eliminated during Mission 1 due to crashes and other problems.
Conrad Quilty-Harper @ Nov 4th 2007 4:20PM
Thanks - I've updated the post. Reuters's write-up confused me!
Cheers,
Conrad
Mark @ Nov 4th 2007 2:55PM
Final results have been announced.
1st Place - Tartan Racing (Carnegie Mellon)
2nd Place - Stanford Racing Team
3rd Place - Victor Tango (Virginia Tech)
Russ @ Nov 4th 2007 5:06PM
wikipeda now has a good table of the race results:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darpa_grand_challenge#Race_Participants_2
JohnTitor @ Nov 4th 2007 3:12PM
Meh, good old German VaMP from a decade ago pwns these cars
melloncollie @ Nov 4th 2007 3:22PM
I' sorry, but I can't take you seriously if you use, in any of its incarnations, "pwns" in a sentence.
Jon @ Nov 4th 2007 3:43PM
Go VT!
BradVT @ Nov 4th 2007 3:47PM
Heck yeah! I go to Virginia Tech. The videos of "Odin" looked pretty cool, I knew it would do well.
Karim @ Nov 4th 2007 4:33PM
For first-timers, VT put in a surprisingly good showing. MIT, a surprisingly flaky one.
Team differences were interesting. Team Tartan was all HOO-ah, kick butt and take names, Vince Lombardi stuff, and a huge frickin' GM gas guzzlin' SUV the way God apparently intended it. Stanford Racing Team was more reserved, with a small, elegant European car, with a downright British, may-the-best-man-win-old-chap attitude.
And of course the head of Stanford Racing (Sebastian Thrun) used to be the star pupil of the head of Team Tartan (Red Whittaker), so you have that whole Obi-Wan to Anakin, "But you were the chosen one!" drama there. Perhaps they should have had the robot cars race over volcanic lava and had it set to music by John Williams.
Congratulations to CMU, Team Tartan and Red Whittaker. Many thanks to the other participants -- particularly Cornell and and MIT for the comic relief fender bender.
Andrew @ Nov 4th 2007 5:31PM
That would make this competition the Revenge of the Sith.
VT's Odin looked like Yoda out there, very relaxed and confident. I guess MIT looked like General Grievous, sick and sputtering. MIT's car apparently has "road rage" programmed into it. When it cut off and crashed into Cornell I could imagine a robotic finger sticking out the window.
It was a great competition and I was really surprised to see Jamie Hyneman as an announcer. The best part of the race, however, was the air raid themed town that the competition was held in.
BradVT @ Nov 4th 2007 5:50PM
@ Karim
What do you mean by first timers? Virginia Tech was in the previous DARPA challenges. Was there some other challenge I never heard of?
Karim @ Nov 4th 2007 11:53PM
@ BradVT: Mea culpa, for some reason I was thinking this was Tech's first effort. Maybe it's because it was their first effort that didn't involve what appeared to be a golf cart? :-)
I stand corrected. In any event, way to make some Ivy League boys eat your dust. ;-) Go Hokies!
applefreak @ Nov 4th 2007 4:12PM
I always thought robots were cool....that is why I build them
go guys who lost, there is always another competition!
Duncan3 @ Nov 4th 2007 4:27PM
"By taking turns without an extra pause to get its bearings, and knowing when the coast was clear enough to gun the engine up to 30 mph (the max speed for the course), Boss may have shaved minutes off its run-time."
In other words, it drives like an asshole in a hurry. Hopefully the Stanford car is the one they produce!
Victor @ Nov 4th 2007 4:34PM
Its a 'race' the point is to finish as fast as possible but still follow the laws of the road. Boss drove aggressively but not outside of the law. If they wanted they could make it drive much smoother. Stanford made an "aggressive passing maneuver" as described by DARPA. Boss didn't get any such complaints.
Victor @ Nov 4th 2007 4:31PM
Carnegie Mellon! Boss won by 20mins. It came in after Stanford but also started way after. It ran a perfect race.
Karim @ Nov 4th 2007 4:38PM
"Drives like an asshole in a hurry?" I believe you meant, "drives like a New Yorker," country boy. ;-)
(leans on horn) The light is green. You can go now. While we're YOUNG.
Russ @ Nov 4th 2007 4:58PM
Some photos tagged with 'urbanchallenge' on flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/urbanchallenge/
Ian @ Nov 4th 2007 5:50PM
Fantastic achievement:)
By the way, he said hi-jacking the thread, I watched this on the worldchallenge/darpa live streaming website. I use WMP11 which is incompatible with the audio codec 9.2 used by this (and some other sites which are technically based on WMP9). Not eve Mr SOfty has found a solution for me yet as I can't DL the 9.2 audio codec on my PC which uses W XP Pro. I am desperate to solve this problem.
Richard C. @ Nov 4th 2007 6:56PM
No help here, but I ran the feed in my browser and in WMP11 without any problems. Are you saying you had no sound? I had audio.
Ian @ Nov 4th 2007 8:20PM
I had no audio at all:( Works elsewhere especially with stereo sound. Weird.
Russ @ Nov 4th 2007 8:17PM
has anyone ripped the live stream and put it on the web somewhere?
chuck @ Nov 4th 2007 10:34PM
so i hope this means flying self-driving cars are coming soon.
UPenn fan @ Nov 5th 2007 1:15AM
The University of Pennsylvania's team -- Ben Franklin racing team -- was the only one of the 6 finishers that did so without the $1 million DARPA start-up fund. They bought a compact car, outfitted it with 6 sensors, 1 camera, a GPS system and 6 Mac-minis powered by the 12 volt cigarette lighter for approx $200,000. The fact that they finished the course was a testament to the elegant and efficient programming of the team and its leader, Professor Daniel Lee. Amazing accomplishment!!
richardofthe1000yaos @ Nov 5th 2007 5:38AM
whoo CMU! When I was a sophomore, Sandstorm (from the second darpa outdoor) used to cruise the parking lot at like one in the morning.
As the popular saying goes
Sex Kills
Come to CMU and live forever
Iridium @ Nov 5th 2007 1:11PM
Self driving cars from CMU are all over the Pittsburg campus. It wasn't rare to see a car with just a passenger cruising around. Of course the passenger had auxilary driving controls just in case.
Carnegie does have a makeup of 40% women. You can have sex if you really want to, just that all of the ones you'd actually want to have sex with go to Oakland to get guys from Pitt. Damn Panthers!!!!!
richardofthe1000yaos @ Nov 5th 2007 1:55PM
hehe- in all fairness- if you factored in all the guys who stayed in their rooms or were stuck in the comp clusters- the PUBLIC makeup of campus was fairly even.
Iridium- are you still a student there?
Ivan @ Nov 28th 2007 2:49PM
So, what is next for this challenge?