Robotic road racers

摘要

The Defense Advanced Research projects Agency, or Darpa, a think tank for DoD, is sponsoring the second annual Grand Challenge next month. It is a race that pits unmanned vehicles against each other and the terrain. And each vehicle is truly on its own. Team members cannot help their vehicle in anyway once it is staged in the starting chute. The vehicle that stays within the rules and completes the course over about 175 miles of southern California with the shortest official time under 10 hr wins its team $2 million. Darpa hopes the Grand Challenge will spur research and development in autonomous, self-navigating vehicles. They want to leverage this R&D to meet the Congressional goal of having a third of all military vehicles being unmanned by 2015.