[extropy-chat] Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Thu Sep 15 07:13:26 UTC 2005


Here's something that isn't boring for a change.

--

Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: September 14, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/business/14robot.html?th=&adxnnl=1&oref=login&emc=th&adxnnlx=1126767823-TcJVmYICUMUVZBSCe+Dj8w

FLORENCE, Ariz. - Cresting a hill on a gravel road at a brisk 20 miles
an hour, a driverless, computer-controlled Volkswagen Touareg plunges
smartly into a swale. When its laser guidance system spots an
overhanging limb, it lurches violently left and right before abruptly
swerving off the road.
 
With their robotic Touareg, known as Stanley, impaled in the brush,
the two passengers - Sebastian Thrun and Michael Montemerlo, both
Stanford computer scientists - pull off their crash helmets and
scramble out to untangle the machine.

A quick survey reveals that the sport utility vehicle is covered with
debris, but the bug-eyed laser, radar and optical vision system on top
of the vehicle is undamaged. So Stanley and its passengers continue on
their way, over 50 miles of dirt road through a cactus-covered
landscape, in the final weeks of preparation for the second round of
the Pentagon's great race.

It has been almost 18 months since the Pentagon's research arm, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, first attracted a motley
array of autonomous vehicles with a prize of $1 million for the first
to complete a 142-mile desert course from Barstow, Calif., to Las
Vegas. The most successful robot, developed by a Carnegie Mellon
University team, managed all of seven miles.

With the next running scheduled for Oct. 8 - and this time a $2
million purse for the winner among 43 entries - it is clear that many
of the participants have made vast progress. For some researchers, it
is an indication of a significant transformation in what has been
largely a science fiction fantasy.

"Computers are starting to sprout legs and move around in the
environment," said Andy Rubin, a Silicon Valley technologist and a
financial backer of this year's Stanford Racing Team, which produced
Stanley. Mr. Rubin, who tinkers with robots himself, was the
co-founder of Danger Inc., which created the Sidekick hand-held.

The Pentagon agency, known as Darpa, struck upon the idea of a race -
calling it the Grand Challenge - as a way to stimulate innovations
useful in battlefield applications like unmanned logistics vehicles.

For the two Stanford scientists, however, the Grand Challenge is about
something larger. "The military are interested in more potent weapons,
and by itself that's a bad answer," said Mr. Thrun, a roboticist and
director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His
broader goal is to advance robotics as a science and explore
applications ranging from aids for the elderly to basic advances in
intelligent computerized systems.

Several years ago, when Mr. Thrun was a professor at Carnegie Mellon
and Mr. Montemerlo was a graduate student, they helped develop a
prototype of a mobile robotic companion for the home that used
natural-language voice commands and was able to provide useful
information taken from the Internet like weather and television
schedules.

There are a myriad of other possible applications for their software,
which can reason about the immediate environment; distinguish sky from
ground, road and trees; and make lightning-quick decisions.

Already in the automotive industry, intelligent cruise control has
become more adept at automatically maintaining the spacing between
cars, and intelligent lane-change and collision-avoidance software is
close to being a reality. Robots are routinely used in manufacturing,
and in Japan a three-foot-tall "house sitter" robot that can recognize
10,000 words and 10 different faces will go on sale in September,
offered by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

In the Darpa contest, though, the proving ground is not the home but
the desert. And several of the contestants, who range from garage
hackers to teams from giant automotive and aerospace corporations, say
this year's course is expected to be even more difficult than last
year's.

The exact course will be secret until just hours before the event
begins, but Darpa officials are said to believe that the original test
was too much an exercise in automatically following global positioning
satellite "bread crumbs" - the data points outlining the route that
are given to the contestants shortly before the race begins.

So this year the course is likely to include unexpected man-made
obstacles and other hurdles that would be trivial for a human driver,
but vexing for the computer-controlled navigational systems that are
at the heart of the technical challenge the Pentagon has laid out.

Despite the added complexity, there is a widespread expectation among
robotics researchers that this time the course will be completed.

The machines, many of which wandered seemingly randomly in the desert
last year, have benefited from more than a year's experience as well
as a significant rush in improvement in every aspect of robotic
vehicle technology. And on a hot August day in the desert here, it was
clear that the field of artificial intelligence has made significant
strides.

The increasing power of the technology was evident during the testing
of the Stanford Racing Team's robotic Touareg, which looks
unexceptional from the outside except for a festoon of sensors and the
slogan "Drivers Not Required" on its side, a play on Volkswagen's
"Drivers Needed" slogan.

Stanley was able to complete a 47-mile dirt-road course here - strewn
with potholes, tight turns, puddles and lined with boulders, foot-high
berms and cactuses - with only two "incidents," which in Mr. Thrun's
scientific vernacular is when his robot does something unplanned, like
leaving the road.

When their Touareg swerved abruptly in a roadside thicket, the team
was quite certain why.

The previous evening Mr. Thrun had persuaded Mr. Montemerlo to remove
an irritating software module, which forced the car to brake rapidly
after swerving to avoid an obstacle. Without the module, at speed the
Touareg fishtailed on the desert road and plunged into the brush
before Mr. Thrun, sitting in the driver's seat with his hand on a
large red "E-Stop" button, could react.

Back inside the Touareg, Mr. Montemerlo, seated in the rear seat with
a laptop computer that is networked to the seven mobile Intel Pentium
processors that comprise Stanley's control logic, fiddles with the
software and reinserts the problematic code. Now the vehicle will
behave more cautiously, although the hard braking will be a little
uncomfortable for its human passengers.

[After fixing two software bugs, the Stanford team managed to put
Stanley through the entire test course on Sept. 7 without crashing.]

In the actual race, of course, there will be no passengers along for
the ride. The teams will be able to follow a short distance behind,
but will have no communication with their vehicles.

For the two researchers, who have been leading a team of 60 developers
from Stanford and Volkswagen, the hiccup is all part of the process of
trying to create machines that can mimic what human drivers do
effortlessly.

The challenge is heightened by the obvious rivalry that the two
scientists feel with their alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. This year, the
Carnegie Mellon Red Team - led by the roboticist William L. Whittaker,
known to all as Red - is testing two robotic vehicles, Sandstorm and
H1ghlander, in the Nevada desert.

With an array of sponsors including Caterpillar, Intel, Boeing,
Harris, Google, and Hummer's manufacturer, AM General, Mr. Whittaker's
team is once again the favorite.

For decades Mr. Whittaker has been one of the most passionate
advocates of robotic vehicles. Despite being bitterly disappointed
last year, when Sandstorm edged off the course after almost completing
the most difficult section of the route, he is confident that more
than one team will succeed this year.

"I would love it if the high school kids won this year," he said, in a
reference to a team from Palos Verdes High School in California, which
is backed by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analog Devices, Goodyear and
others.

Whether or not one of the vehicles arrives at the finish line this
year, Mr. Whittaker says the credibility problems that have dogged the
field are largely in the past.

Of the event, which will begin this year near a rough-and-tumble bar
south of Barstow, he said, "I don't know whether it's going to be more
like Lindbergh landing in Paris or more like Woodstock."

-- 

Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *



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