Wednesday, September 28, 2005

1316.aspx

Qualifications for the $2 million DARPA Grand Challenge starts today

The National Qualification Event for the DARPA Grand Challenge starts today in California Speedway in Fontana. The admission to the speedway is free and open to the public from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM today (September 28) to October 5. The twenty best teams will participate in the Grand Challenge October 8.



The Grand Challenge was a bit of a disappointment last year as the best participant only managed to travel 7.4 miles out of the scheduled 142. Then again; it is not easy to build an independent, robotic ground vehicle that has to travel up to 175 miles by itself in less than 10 hours. No human interaction is allowed apart from a remote shut down system. The autonomous vehicle must make all decisions by itself in a fraction of a second in order to drive at more than 17 miles on bumpy roads. Red Team had the best entry last year and is favorite of the many teams this year as well. The 1986 HMMWV carries externally mounted carries vision, radar, laser and GPS sensors:



DARPA will award $2 million the quickest vehicle that successfully navigates the course in less than 10 hours on October 8.  The exact route will only be published 2 hours before the race starts. There will be video hight lights from the monitoring points and spectators will be able to view the vehicles and talk to the teams.  Get the latest news from the teams blogs feed and live web casts from the Grand Challenge Site

2 comments:

  1. Hi Mik.



    It works for me...



    The home page requires you to accept ActiveX and it is using akamai.net for delivering contents which may give problems with some proxy servers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Errata corrige. The error seems to be on DNS, it seems that they have recently mooved the domain without taking care of the time needed for moving them... Now the autoritative DNS for that domain are: ns1.darpa.mil and ns2.darpa.mil but neither of them has the zone mounted...

    ReplyDelete