The Golem Group's DARPA Vehicles: from left,
Golem 1 and Golem 2.
UCLA Engineering Team Selected as Semifinalist
for 2005 Autonomous Vehicle Challenge
Forty Teams Advance to Next Round in Quest
tor $2 Million Prize
In March of 2004, just outside
of Barstow, California, a series of driverless, robotic vehicles
set out across the desert for Las Vegas. One after another they
came to a halt, and the $1 million prize for the Grand Challenge
went unclaimed. But the race isn’t over yet.
Forty self-navigating vehicles were chosen Monday
by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to compete
in an October 8 sequel to last year's first-ever autonomous on
and off road vehicle challenge across the Mojave Desert.
UCLA’s team, dubbed the Golem Group (named
after their partnership with the Group), successfully passed the
second qualification stage.
UCLA’s team includes UCLA faculty and graduates
from computer science, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering.
Two of the graduate students who worked on last year’s vehicle
are back for another try – Jason Meltzer and Eagle Jones.
Last year’s unmanned vehicle traveled 5.2 miles, and was
one of the best performers in the field.
For their second attempt,
the graduate students will design and equip two vehicles simultaneously
– one as a contender and one as a back up. The vehicles
cannot be controlled remotely and must rely on global positioning,
various sensors, lasers, radar and vision systems, or cameras,
to orient themselves and detect and avoid randomly placed obstacles.
This year, the stakes are higher. The prize money
has been doubled to $2 million after none of the 15 contestants
in last year’s race were able to complete the difficult
desert course.
The semifinalists will compete head-to-head at
the California Speedway in Fontana in September and October in
a series of intermediate trials designed to test the self-navigation
skills of the robotic vehicles. Only half of the semifinalists
chosen this week will actually qualify for the final race in October,
based on how they perform, without human help, in the trials.
For the 20 teams competing in the final challenge,
the first robot to make it across 150 miles of desert between
Los Angeles and Las Vegas in less than 10 hours wins. The exact
course is kept a highly guarded secret until just two hours before
the actual race time.
This year's group of semifinalists includes most
of last year's participants. The teams come from 16 states across
the U.S. and Canada. Nearly 200 teams applied for this year's
challenge. The group of 118 accepted contenders included MIT,
Princeton, the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania,
Dartmouth, the University of Texas as well as Berkeley, Stanford,
Cornell, Caltech, CMU and 5 of the UC campuses. Not all have made
it past the second qualification round.
In a press release put out
by DARPA, Grand Challenge Program Manager Ron Kurjanowicz praised
all 118 entrants and their sponsors, and underscored that the
40 semifinalists were selected from a very strong field of competitors.
“It is truly remarkable how much progress the Grand Challenge
teams have made in a relatively short period of time,” he
said. “The NQE will be very exciting and we will see autonomous
vehicle performance that was not possible a year ago. The teams’
creative sparks are flying and they are making impressive progress
toward DARPA’s goal of developing technologies that will
save the lives of our men and women in uniform on the battlefield.”
For more information on the DARPA Grand Challenge,
visit http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/NQE_Press_Release.pdf.
For more information on UCLA’s Golem Group,
visit http://www.golemgroup.com,
or to find further information about UCLA’s vision lab,
go to http://www.vision.cs.ucla.edu/.
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06.07.05
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