Robotic race revs on beyond the finish line

Stanford: Self-driving cars
The leading teams are already moving on to new challenges. For example, Thrun's team is trying to develop an autonomous automobile that can go from San Francisco to Los Angeles without a human touching the controls.

"I'm completely obsessed with the idea of making the self-driving car a reality, because it will be such a fundamental change for society," he said. Thrun noted that more than 40,000 Americans die annually in motor vehicle accidents — "about as many people as we lost in all of the Vietnam War" — and he hopes that robotic driving systems could cut that in half.

He said good progress already has been made in developing the components for such systems, including adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assistants. "We're 60 percent of the way to the car that can go on I-5 and keep driving in a lane," Thrun said.

The goal is to demonstrate the S.F.-to L.A. feat by Oct. 8, 2007 — two years to the day since Stanley won the $2 million.

Some of that $2 million is going into the new effort, Thrun said, but "a good amount" of it also went to create an endowed fellowship for graduate students in engineering.

"We feel this is tax money, so we owe it to the taxpayer to make sure that the money is invested in a responsible way," Thrun said.

Oshkosh: Robo-trucks for the military
Oshkosh Truck Corp., the Wisconsin-based company that was the main sponsor of the TerraMax team, is already adapting the technologies from its Grand Challenge entrant for potential real-world scenarios.

Oshkosh Truck The 16-ton TerraMax truck finished the DARPA Grand Challenge course in 2005, but not within the allotted 10 hours.

In January, Oshkosh demonstrated a military transport vehicle outfitted with an autonomous-control kit similar to the one that was put on its 16-ton TerraMax truck for the robot race. The military vehicle, known as the Palletized Load System or PLS, transported cargo in unmanned mode over a 7-mile desert course at the U.S. Army Tactical Wheeled Vehicle Component Technology Demonstrations in Yuma, Ariz., said Oshkosh spokeswoman Kirsten Skyba.

"It went very, very well," she told MSNBC.com. "Now we're really at a stage where, if the U.S. military is interested in getting this on some of their vehicles, we're ready to move forward with that."

Skyba said the cost of installing the autonomous-control kit is "about the price of armoring a truck" — that is, less than $100,000.

Carnegie Mellon: Rovers and robo-farmhands
At CMU, Whittaker's Red Team is morphing into a corporation called Red Team Enterprises. "One of the effects of the Grand Challenge was to shift some of the enterprise from research to development and applications, and so part of the next phase is commercial," Whittaker told MSNBC.com.

Joe Seamans / WGBH - PBS The Red Team's Sandstorm vehicle, a converted Humvee, sported a sensor-equipped gimbal on top.

The potential applications range from mining operations to environmental mapping to planetary exploration, Whittaker said.

To cite just one example, Whittaker's group is working with NASA's Glenn Research Center and Johnson Space Center on technologies that would be suited for the deep craters at the moon's south pole, where rovers would have to descend steep slopes and work autonomously during long communication blackouts. Such robots would have to "reason a great deal about the terrain and intricate movement on the slopes," Whittaker said.

"Agriculture is another arena that we're taking on," he said. The potential applications range from assisted navigation for tractors and self-propelled harvesters to fence-monitoring robots and pasture-clipping machines.

Even though the Red Team didn't come away with DARPA's $2 million prize, Whittaker looked back at the Grand Challenge as a grand success.

"For this team," he said, "it was always about the challenge of the technology, and the challenge of the course. ... In something like this, the only way to lose would be to not play. The Grand Challenge is just one of those things where there was no question that if it's robotics, and it's out there in the world, that's something that this team is going to be up for."

Correction for May 1: This report originally cited an incorrect timetable for the Pentagon's move toward autonomous vehicles.

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