The DARPA Grand Challenge is an event established by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which offers prize money for the team who can build completely self-driving robotic vehicles to complete a complex mission goal. There are no humans onboard and there is no human remotely controlling the vehicles. The vehicles are completely autonomous.

The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge took place holding out a $1 million dollar prize for the vehicle that could traverse a 142 mile desert stretch in 10 hours or less. One vehicle made it 7.4 miles, a few made it 5 or 6 miles, and many didn’t make it very far past the starting line.

In 2005 the prize money was increased to $2 million dollars for the vehicle that could traverse a new 132 mile course in the desert. Perrone Robotics formed Team Jefferson initially as a small budget side project to demonstrate a faster and cheaper approach for complex robotics development using their MAX robotics software platform. After a number of intermediate milestone evaluations, 195 applications were ultimately whittled down to 40 semi-finalists invited out to trials at the California Speedway with Team Jefferson among them. Stanford University partnering with Volkswagen completed the course just under 7 hours.

In 2007, a new challenge, the Urban Challenge, will take place with autonomous vehicles navigating city driving conditions, merging with traffic, obeying traffic laws, parallel parking, and many other new challenges. The Urban Challenge requires that vehicles autonomously navigate over 60 miles of such conditions in 6 hours or less. A first prize of $2 million is being offered followed by a $500k second prize and $250k third prize. Team Jefferson intends to be there.



Team Jefferson and their off-road dune buggy ‘Tommy’ were involved with the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge events. They’re back readying ‘Tommy Junior’ for the 2007 Urban Challenge events.

More Information:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp
http://www.teamjefferson.com/

 

Nice!!!

 

Sweeeeeeet!

 

"There are no humans onboard and there is no human remotely controlling the vehicles"

I see this phenomena all the time around LA.......

 

That's awesome.

 

Very Cool..

 

Yeah I just saw the DARPA episode of NOVA.
You go boy!

 

I see that around here sometimes, too

 

Stanley was at the Chicago Auto Show in 2006. Very impressive.

Good luck, Team Jefferson!

 

Good Luck to Team Jefferson, but i don't think it will win, the xB doesn't have the ground clearance of a jeep wrangler or Volkswagen touareg. Sorry to be pessimistic, i will still support any Scion to the fullest.

 

"Urban challenge"

The only thing it will need clearance for is speed bumps...

 

I noticed, the xB is the ultimate urban transport

 

"the birth of AI"...

 

They should use the 5-axis xB as the plaform, that actually looks like a robot... they could replace the speakers with dummy missle launchers and the decks with radar. That woul be crazy.

 

haha thats what i think about when i read this... but i love how this shows how far technology is progressing.

 

Thats kewl!!