DARPA: Grand Challenge

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition that was open to the public and originally hosted in 2004, with each teams objective being to create a fully autonomous land vehicle, completely driverless which could reach speeds of up to 20 miles per hour. These driverless cars were set the challenge to go 142 miles across the Mojave dessert in America, from Barstow to just outside Las Vegas, along the course the cars would come accross natural and man made obsticles. The Grand Challenge is sponsored by the US Department of Defence, with the objective of making one third of ground vehicles unmanned by 2015, thus many of the entrants have based alot of the cars technologies to be suited for the army. The first competition had 106 teams enter, but was a complete disaster, with the best car reaching a distance of only 7.36 miles, such a shambles it was thought that it couldn't be achieved. The two main objectives that a car that drives itself are to follow a GPS route, and to detect obsticles. With the cars in the first Grand Challenge, many found they could either follow the GPS really well, or detect obsticles really well which resulted in many cars making it a pitiful distance through the course. With mistakes learned the teams went back and prepared for the next Grand Challenge schedualed in 2005 a year and a half later. This time the outcome was to be revolutionary with 5 cars making it to the finish line with the fastest time of six hours fifty four minutes set by Stanley Racing Team, with the car also safely over taking another competitor during the course. This revolution in robotics would mark next step to create a car that could drive itself through a town, from several points encountering traffic (the objective of DARPA: Grand Challenge 2007).

The potential of such technologies are massive. With a vision that one day every car on the road will follow the rules of the road without question, every speed limit would be followed and the potential for car crashes to be a thing of the past. The risk of being near roads would become infinately less as long as the padestrian also followed the rules of the road. You could also get into your car and just press a button that would take you to a pre-set destination like the supermarket or cinema.

I feel that the driverless car could have many positive impacts on society in that it can save peoples lives, improve productivity, imrpove quality of live for ageing population, increase road throughput, provide a better public transport system, allow the age of people who can use the vehicle to be lowered. This is a sustainable technology in the making that is improving exponentially, as computing power is getting more and more powerful so does the potential of these robots and robotics itself. As robots have already had such a huge impact on hour lives, this is a huge advancement in modern technology and its impacts should be thought about.

The questions I want to ask are:

What are the technologies used in creating the driverless car?
What hardware on general level is used in a driverless car?
What are the possibilities of the new technologies being created?
What problems are there with the technology of a driving car?
Can these technologies be applied to other aspects of our lives?

My plan of enquiry:

To do internet research on several of the competing teams websites as well as the actual Grand Challenge website.
To find out what general technologies are used in making the driverless car.
To get a general knowledge of how the car works on a logical level.
To email the team leader and other members of the Stanford Racing Team questions specific to their roles.
To email other teams within the competition to get a wider range of opinions and approaches to the problem.
To get other peoples opinions on how this would affect their lives and what issues they have with it.
To follow the current advancements in current Grand Challenge as the qualification for the final take place.

Bibliogrphy:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=5492900375140699415&q=the+grand+challenge&total=1113&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 [documentary by winning team of the grand challenge]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darpa_grand_challenge#History_and_Background [dates and figures]
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/