DOD won't award cash in next robot race

By Alicia Chang

updated 12:43 p.m. ET Oct. 20, 2006

LOS ANGELES - After Stanford University won a Pentagon robot race through the Mojave Desert last year, engineers and students hoisted an oversized $2 million check and poured bubbly champagne over their unmanned Volkswagen SUV.

Next year's winners won't be as rich.

The Pentagon's research arm, which has twice hosted the high-tech contests since 2004, blames an obscure section in a defense spending law signed by President Bush this week. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency believes the law prevents the agency from awarding the $2.7 million prize money.

So instead, DARPA will hand out shiny trophies to the top three teams whose smart vehicles can weave through congested city traffic without human help.

"I promise that the trophies will be given because I'll personally buy them myself," Tony Tether, DARPA's director, told competitors earlier this year.

The absence of a lucrative cash prize has forced some teams to retool their game plan and others to drop out. Some fear it would be harder to attract corporate sponsors and hurt media coverage of the race, which drew a throng of reporters last year and inspired a PBS documentary.

"The icing on the cake is gone," said Ivar Schoenmeyr, team leader of California-based Team CyberRider, which is retrofitting a Toyota Prius hybrid.

DARPA has sponsored the cash prize competitions to spur development of smart vehicles that could be used in the battlefield. The agency, which was created during the Cold War and is best known for research that led to the Internet, is under a congressional mandate to help cut casualties by having a third of the military's ground vehicles unmanned by 2015.

Unlike previous races where robotic vehicles had to conquer the rugged desert, next year's challenge will test how well they can carry out a mock military supply mission through bottlenecked traffic.

The contest — to be held in November 2007 in an unnamed Western state — will test vehicles' ability to navigate themselves through city traffic, obey traffic laws and make U-turns — all without causing an accident.

Last year, the 195 teams that applied had to raise their own money. This year, 89 teams entered, including 11 that received up to $1 million each by DARPA to participate. The decision to fund some teams was independent of the prize loss.

At least one team that failed to receive seed money dropped out. San Diego-based AutoCommute, which raced last year under another name, has been perfecting cameras that can accurately sense lane markings. The company in talks with several teams to sell the technology.

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