Robotic race revs on beyond the finish line

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

March 27, 2006 - It was the kind of story you could make a movie about.

Scores of teams from all over the country devise riderless cars for a grand competition, with an elite field of 23 teams facing off in the Mojave Desert for the finals. In the end, it comes down to two teams. One is led by a grizzled ex-Marine. The other is guided by a soft-spoken, German-born professor. The prize? Two ... million ... dollars.

This is no made-up plot line from "Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies." It's the real-life story of last fall's DARPA Grand Challenge, and it's finally coming to the screen in the form of a "Nova" public-TV documentary titled "The Great Robot Race."

The hourlong show, which makes its debut March 28, turns the Pentagon-sponsored Grand Challenge into a drama on the scale of a "Survivor" episode, even though the outcome of this particular reality-TV program is well-known. The film crews followed some of the teams for months before the race, delving into the personalities behind the pursuit:

• Sebastian Thrun, the German-born robotics professor, and his Stanford University team won the $2 million prize when their robotic Volkswagen, named Stanley, crossed the finish line at the end of a grueling 132-mile course.
• Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, led by robotics professor and ex-Marine Red Whittaker, entered two vehicles in the Grand Challenge. Sandstorm, a modified Humvee that was a veteran of the first Grand Challenge back in 2004, came in a close second to Stanley. The Red Team's other entrant, a customized Hummer called H1ghlander, came in third.
• Two other teams completed the whole course: Wisconsin's TerraMax and Louisiana's Team Gray, which made a valiant effort just weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit their home base in Metairie, La.
• Then there are the lovable also-rans: Berkeley grad student Anthony Levandowski, whose quirky robo-motorcycle sometimes fell down and couldn't get up ... and Team D.A.D., two brothers who went from tinkering with "Battlebots" to tinkering with an autonomously controlled truck.

The show traces how the teams looked for that winning edge, whether it was the Red Team's sensor-equipped gimbal system or the Stanford team's multilayered steering software. In the end, however, the contest between Stanley and Sandstorm was decided by seemingly unpredictable twists of fortune — just like in the movies.

Damian Dovarganes / AP Stanford team leader Sebastian Thrun holds a $2 million check as he catches a ride on top of Stanley, a tricked-out Volkswagen Touareg R5, after his team was declared the official winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005.

"The truth is, we were lucky to win, and Red could have easily won," Thrun told MSNBC.com.

The end of the race was by no means the end of the line for the racing teams. In fact, the whole point of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competition was to encourage technologies that could someday be used to save lives in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2015, the Pentagon hopes that a third of its ground vehicles will be autonomous, reducing the risk to military convoys in hostile areas.

By that measure, the Grand Challenge was worth the multimillion-dollar cost to the American taxpayer, said DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker. "It was a good demonstration of the art of the possible," she told MSNBC.com.

Walker said the agency intended to sponsor yet another Grand Challenge, although she said it was too early to specify what form it might take or how much might be offered as a prize.

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