DARPA Grand Challenge

I just want to remember that before this DARPA race, the Army had been try to build the same robot car for the past 6 years ? and all their car did was move 6" and stop. It didn't anything else. You think 2 million is alot? think about what the Army invested their robot car, a whole lot more that 2 million.

Jerry Petrey wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@raytheon.com:

... snip ...

I think here's perfect use, the US Mexico border OR infact any country with a border that can't be maintained safely by people. How about Afganistan Pakistan, Isreal Palestine. How about search and rescue for lost folks in forests, fire fighting. How about wandering around in the north and south pole? I can see in the future, a special traffic lane for driver less truck hauling goods (supermarket foods, etc) at all hours of the day all year long, with not stopping. Every time I go to Los Angeles there's a stupid truck accident locking up traffic on the highways, because some jerk off decided to cut off a semi truck. Just think, there will be no more truck driver road rage. If you got a 100's or acre cattle ranch, send out the round up truck to round up the cows, bison , anything.

There's plenty of uses for this technology.

"Randy M. Dumse" wrote in news:HLa3f.45$Su.619 @eagle.america.net:

If the baker would have had an insurance policy, the window would have been paid for by the insurance company. Additionaly, the glasiers son was never caught, he's been doing this for years and knows what he is doing. The issue here is that children in America are not being raised properly. The glasier is at the bar every night of the week while his son runs rampant. Father and son should be building robots in the garage.

I would really have expected more from you, Randy. The money people and organizations spent was their money, their choice. Do you really think you are in any position to tell people how they should spend their money?

I spoke to a Marine Colonel at the event who said the Army has spent about .5 billion on similar projects and he told me that their vehicles couldn't even complete the 3 mile NQE course. The fact that over 1/2 of the 43 semi-finalist teams were able to complete the NQE course, budgets large and small, shows that solving this problem is not just about money - its about the approach. So yes, I think this was a good move for DARPA. They probably got a billion dollars of research and technology for about $10 or $15 million. That's a big savings for you since your (an my) taxes support DARPA. DARPA did not force any team to join up. It was all voluntary so I don't see where you can make the argument that money was taken away from something else to fund it.

The team I am with, Insight Racing, placed 12th overall after completing nearly 28 miles. We were on a very small budget, most of it from our own personal money so we scrutinized _every_ purchase with a magnifying glass. Our vehicle, all sensors, controllers, actuators, h-bridges, computers, etc, come in at a small fraction of what most other teams spent.

DARPA really liked our articulated bumper, BTW, which helped to get us out of more than one tight spot. On two seperate incidents on the NQE course, we nudged up against one of the gates (traffic cones), actuated the bumper, shifted to reverse, backed up a few meters, re-oriented, and steered correctly in between the two cones. Had we run over the cone or gone outside, we would not have been given credit for passing through the gate. The DARPA director who was watching along side our three launch crew members was heard to say "That is so cool!". We also used it to good effect in one case where we nicked a parked minivan obstacle in the course. Instead of being stopped, the bumper actuated, we backed up, reoriented, and drove around the van clearing the obstacle. We were charged with hitting the obstacle, but instead of being hung up on it, which would have happend to most of the other robots, we were able to detect the impact, backup and complete the coarse while retaining a good score.

It's their money, and their choice. If you really feel strongly about this, I would expect you to take _all_ profits from your company New Micros, Inc. and sink into that research. But you don't have any say in how other people spend their money.

Wow ... I would certainly expect someone in the field to have an appreciation of the difficulty of this problem. Maybe you really are an armchair general. I didn't think so previously, but the above statement is truly ignorent of the challenges faced by teams and totally minimizes the problems that had to be overcome just to get to the starting line.

And the "no other immediate use" statement - are you totally against research? How many life saving drugs have started out from compounds that "have no other immediate use"? How many technologies that are commonplace today have started out from technical curiousities that "have no other immediate use"? Your statements are extremely short sighted.

You are free to spend your money how you see fit. Other organizations and people are not accountable to you for their expenditures.

-Brian

Geez, Randy - I wish you best and hope your recovery is speedy and complete, which it sounds like you are well on your way. It is a testament to your tenacity that you are this far along so soon.

I now understand some of your statements in this new light. You should have prefaced your arguments with this news so that we knew better where you were coming from.

All the best to you ... get well soon so we can continue discussions on robots, controllers, sensors, AI, the meaning of life :-)

-Brian

I am on one of the teams and our chase vehicle guy said that the gas company dug up a section of the course and it was too late to fill it back in and/or the fill was too soft for the vehicles to cross or something like that. This was all unexpected and so DARPA had to scramble to short circuit an 11 mile section of the course to avoid that area. But it appears that the vehicle tracking system did not account of the 11 mile shorter section until later and that is the discrepancy.

-Brian

Similar experience here - our team, Insight Racing, launched about 10 minutes after Terra Max. I was video taping our truck moving off in the distance, probably about a mile out when all the sudden I hear the crowd "ooooohhhh" off to my right and turned to see Alice nosed up on the berm looking skyward.

It took forever for DARPA to clear Alice from the course and we were paused for a while along with Terra Max and the others behind here. When we did finally come back by the spectator stand, you might remember use - the white Chevy Suburban that was weaving and canyoning down the road. Our magnetic compass was apparently off by 10 or 15 degrees though we had just calibrated the day before and it was on perfect. Perhaps all the power lines down that 8 mile dry lake bed had a bad effect on it we don't know.

Regarding Terra Max saying the wind was high - it was very much so. We were experiencing heavy dust clouds affecting our LIDAR and the high winds also broke a strap tha supports the LIDAR sun screen, causing it to flap down in front of the LIDAR intermittently. The LIDAR is used for obstacle avoidance and the flapping was causing an "obstacle" to termittantly appear right in front which was also contributing to the weaving.

When we saw it pass us by the spectator area in that condition we thought it won't be long now. We really didn't want to go down like Alice, though, right in front of all those people. But the "Desert Rat" was tenacious and did not give up - we went another 20 miles like that, passing the likes of Princeton, UCLA, Cornell and Cal Tech.

The frustrating thing is that if we had not had the above problems, we could have gone quite a bit farther. But that's the breaks. We aren't complaining.

Regarding Ensco, we were in the bay next to them at the NQE and got to know some of their team. Very nice folks. The funny thing is, or not so funny, is that when we were filling our tires with Fix-A-Flat, they were shining theirs up with Armorall. Later, after the race, one of their team members told us that they wished they had been using Fix-A-Flat instead :-)

The web site was not so hot at tracking. But DARPA had a 3-D display in the "Map Room" where the whole course region was modeled on a 3-d terrain relief surface map. Above the map, projectors projected the whole course down from above along with each vehicle's position and status, updated in real time. You could literally watch the vehicle number's move along the course at their course-relative speed. While you could not tell if a vehicle was paused (its color did not change or anything, it just didn't move), the color would change to red if the vehicle was e-stopped and out of the race. The "Map Room" was very cool, but its downside was that it was too limited by space and a long line formed outside that tent limiting access to it.

Also, there was a long time when Terra Max was paused. The reason I heard on pretty good authority was that their chase vehicle broke down

- it overheated, or they had radio problems, or something like that. So Terra Max was paused for a very long time due to no fault of their own. It was always part of DARPA's plan, announced in team leader meetings prior to the race that if they needed to shut down vehicles and continue the next day to complete, that they would. Terra Max and the Gray Team both were subject to this. One of the reasons given was that in westerly directions during the late afternoon/evening hours, the sun is very bright in the desert with it being low on the horizon and presented a safety problem for both the robots and chase vehicles. So the plan was to shut down at 6pm and start up again at 6am the next morning. DARPA actually announced that The Gray team and Terra Max would be stopped and restarted the next morning. But the Gray team convinced DARPA to let them continue, that they did not have any sensors that would be affected by the setting sun and DARPA let them continue and finish on Saturday. Terra Max stopped and finished up the next day.

-Brian

Hi Brian, How do you feel about a civilian robot race? Would you enter your vehicle?

thanks Ed

Sigh! Well, imagine how I feel, then.

Not only misunderstood, my position misstated, but you with a condescending tone.

No, I'm not against private individuals, not against freedom, that never been my position.

What I do think I am in a position to do, as citizen (and particularly as someone who was commissioned by an act of the US Congress to defend the constitution) is voice dissent when agents in the government act illegal and unconstitutional, in violation of the 14th Amendment, _and_ which has far reaching negative consequences for our industry.

Offering prize money from tax revenue is at the very least questionable, and at most unconscionable. Then choosing who can and cannot compete by less than elimination by competition, is a violation of law 14th equal protection).

I have been opposed to the Grand Challenge since they excluded teams, not on performance, but on their arbitrary desires of who they wanted to have compete. I am also opposed to the attempt to manipulate the industry, but that is a lesser issue, fruit of the same tree.

Here's a moral question for you, Brian, if the Grand Challenge had eliminated all teams with Asian and African descendants before the real contest, (no less a violation under the 14th, just easier to see and understand as being such) would you have still participated? Or would you have seen it as your civic duty to abstain/withdraw?

We have both already answered that question with our respective actions. I would really have hoped for more from you, Brian. I would have hoped more from all the contestants, each offended by individuals hijacking good government for their own ends. I would have hoped we'd have all protested, and helped defend the constitution from this assault and violation. But not everyone can reason through the problem, nor has the background or studies to know consequences. Each man follows the path that is clear to him, given his understanding, personal level of development and conscience.

Great. Thanks. Are you sure though? because my point isn't about my medical condition, it's about moral and wise behavior.

Thanks, but it was. Scary. The good news is my remarkable recovery, through, I have no doubt, recent improvements in medical treatment.

Only 52 here. Just over 2 weeks ago, I couldn't care less about strokes, I was only worried about my heart, which has been threatening. Only knew a few people who ever had one. It had been suggested as a potential problem for me, but it seemed very remote, beyond spots of vision I'm loosing.

What a difference a day can make.

Of course my point here, is: everyone has different economic interests. What we need to be sure of, is the guys with the guns, and now most of our money through taxation, don't take over deciding what research will and will not be allowed, just by giving away prizes, with caprice.

I quite agree. Nature may not have the best solution we can engineer, but at least it has some excellent examples we can start from. Until we can exceed nature, we'd better be humble enough to respect what she teaches.

No, not at all.

I'm sure I sound like a mad political scientist, or such. Obviously my position is often misunderstood. Different people study different fields, and like my interest in stroke recovery, different events will change their interest and perspectives. I happen to have an interest in social systems as well as electro-mechanical ones.

--Snip--

Hi Randy, I have not heard of this exclusion. Is there anywhere that I can read more about it?

Thanks, Bob

Hi Bob, you might be able to go back about a year and a half on this news group and pick up lots of posts on it.

Basically, DARPA expected a few dozen teams. They got around 400. So they made an arbitrary announcement they were sending out inspectors, and they wanted to see all the contestants plans and prototypes, and they'd decide who was worthy and who was culled. The culled were not actually allowed to compete, even though they were still just part way into the design stage and months before the contest.

I've heard, many of those inspectors now have been hired in better paying jobs in the industrial military complex, by the way. But this is hearsay, and I have no first hand knowledge of such practices. However, this isn't Denmark, but I smell something familiar.

I didn't see that, and I headed one of the losing teams.

This year, you had to submit a video. Those who looked like they had a clue in the video had a site visit. At the site visit, you had to run a very simple obstacle course. That eliminated those who didn't have anything working. Then came the NQE, and obstacle courses. Everybody who had a clean run at the NQE went to Primm.

What's the problem?

John Nagle Team Overbot

In the post I responded to you complained about what was sacrificed to put on the DGC - that the money and resources should have been devoted to other areas.

Hate to break it to you, but people are spending money right now this very instant on things that you probably don't agree with, and that money could be spent on your pet projects. It's happening all the time, at far greater tax payer expense than this little DGC project.

The government offers prize money all the time - for turning in criminals because it's for the greater good. One can argue that developing robot technology is for the greater good. Would you protest if the government offered a prize for a cure for cancer?

You didn't mention this in the post I responded to. Your arguments were economic based.

I don't know about civic duty, but I certainly would not knowingly participate in any event where anyone was excluded based on race, religion, etc. That would just be the proper thing to do.

But your phrasing the hypothetical that way implies that DARPA did that. Being an actual participant in the event, I will tell you that from my experience and observations, DARPA bent over backwards to accomodate all teams. You've already said that your hypothetical is hearsay. Why don't you have the person(s) affected come forward and file a lawsuit against DARPA for discrimination - if there is a case it should be heard. Wouldn't that be your civic duty to bring this forward so that those who did it can be held responsible and not continue to do this to people?

Regarding the process of who participated, and who didn't, it went like this. First you had to do the paperwork to file your intentions to participate - 195 teams did that. Then you had to submit a video that showed specific features of your vehicle that DARPA asked to see

- if you couldn't do that, you didn't get a site visit. If you did, you got a site visit - 118 teams did that. DARPA actually sent out representatives to 118 teams! Ours was very short and to the point - all teams had run a 200 meter course, with at least 2 30+ degree turns and avoid two obstacles (30 gallon trach cans). You got three chances to run it. We did it all three times, we cleared all gates perfectly and cleared 5 out of the 6 obstacles, each in under a minute. Based on site visit performance, DARPA selected 40 teams.

Some teams were on the edge and DARPA even gave them a second chance - a second site visit. Of those, 3 teams were added so there you have

43 teams.

Those 43 teams showed up at the NQE. Before you were ever even allowed on the NQE course, you had to pass a "static" inspection - vehicles must conform to DARPA specs with regard to caution light, audible alarm, brake lights, etc, etc. Then you had to pass a "dynamic" test - a simple 200 ft straight line run using a couple waypoints - the DARPA operator shuts down your vehicle mid-way and verifies your e-stops.

Some teams at the NQE did extremely well - Stanford, CMU, Cornell, VA Tech, etc, etc. Other teams did not even get through the first gate. At least one team was several days into the event before they could even pass their initial "dynamic" test.

DARPA gave the teams that were struggling _every_ opportunity to run the course, even to the point of creating an alternate course for those teams on the next to the last day so that they could at least complete _something_.

We ran the course 5 times. On our first 2 runs we had PC power supply going bad which caused our main sensor computer to go down both runs. It took a while to figure out because the power supply worked intermittantly and we could never seem to catch it while it was acting up. But once we discovered that problem, we sent someone out to a local CompUSA to get a replacement power supply and then we ran the course 3 more times with one of those a near perfect run clearing 49 out of 50 gates and avoiding 5 out of 5 ostacles. On our other runs we cleared in the high 40's out of 50 gates and avoided 4 out of 5 obstacles. Those three runs were plenty good to get us into the top

2. So from what I saw, as a member of a team who was there from the beginning to the end, I didn't see the things you spoke of above. The process was elimination by competition. The accusations you've made are very serious and you really should be very sure of your facts before accusing someone or an organization of such a thing. Like I mentioned above, if you have the facts, I think it is _your_ civic duty to come forward and expose them. But USENET is probably not the optimal place for that.

-Brian

You too.

So you never heard about any of this when it was happening?

I don't recall accusing anyone of anything, not in this thread anyway.

Is that the worst you can find? Seriously, an article in the esteemed "The Register" from 2 years ago? Boy, that really does rip into DARPA doesn't it?

Instead of some deep and intricate covered-up plot by DARPA to confound and confuse potential participants with their evil plan to "exclude them from the event", I find it much more likely that DARPA under estimated the number of teams wanting to participate and had to trim the field to what they thought they could logistically handle and they chose what they thought were the most likely candidates to actually have vehicles ready for the event. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetance ... or something like that.

I do remember some of the complaints about the (not unexpected) rule change that limited the number of entrants for DGC version 1. But in trimming down the field of entrants, DARPA did offer a site visit even back then to see what teams had before doing so - that was what, 5 months before the event? If you didn't have working technology to demonstrate by then, a mere few months before the event, you had next to no chance of being ready by the time of the event anyway. So if you were cut because you had nothing to show at the offered site visit, what's the complaint? And you're saying it was discrimination? I think your argument is on life support.

Lots of teams that participated in DGC 1 or wanted to participate but were not selected were back for DGC 2. So everyone got their chance this time around, with plenty of forewarning, and folks don't have much to complain about if they were even remotely serious about competing in the first place. DARPA planned better and the selection process was better for DGC version 2.

So I don't think there is an evil conspiracy here, in DGC version 1 nor in version 2.

-Brian

.........

Hi Brian. Can you expand a little on what kind of obstacles there were? Maybe mention what sensors were used to detect them.

thanks,

- dan michaels

=====================

DARPA presents the course to teams in RDDF form - an ASCII text file containing lat/lon of each waypoint, segment width defining the boundary between two waypoints, and a suggested speed for the segment (not to be exceeded).

The first RDDF was 2.2 miles and consisted of passing between several gates to a "high speed" section which whose speed was 40 MPH. That fed into a hay bail funnel. While the hay bails were not considered obstacles, they gave most of the teams their problems, oddly enough.

The hay bail funnel led into a long tunnel lined with metal to block GPS signals. After the tunnel, the course wound near a stacked pile of tires and to the first official obstacle which was a parked "rental" car as the announcer described it. Vehicles had to avoid the card and move on to the "rough terrain" section which was composed of

4x4 and 2x4 posts and car tires lying flat on the ground with hay bails lining the sides.

After that, vehicles had to navigate a simulated "mountain pass" where the course hugged up tight agains a long curved row of k-rail barriers. Following that was a few twisty turns and then into the home stretch which had two more "rental" cars on it that needed to be avoided. The last section of the course had some rumble strips (speed bumps) immediately followed by a tank trap that also needed to be avoided.

The official obstacles were the rental cars and the tank trap - 4 for RDDF 1, though the hay bails, tunnel, k-rails were hit a lot but did not count as obstacles.

On RDDF 2, which I beleive was 2.7 miles and the first one we successfully navigated, I think that one included a new "rental" car and re-arranged the order of some of the sections. And instead of the high speed section which was on pavement, it included a parallel section but on grass instead of pavement and the speed was lower and much rougher. That RDDF had 5 obstacles instead of 4.

Similarly with RDDF 3 - I can't remember the specifics - all the courses were similar, just hooked up the sections in different orders and the inclusion of the van as a 5th obstacle. We actually hit the van, twice I think. First time we barely scraped by it - we actually avoided it OK, but turned back into the centerline too early and scraped down the left side of our truck. The second time we hit, we were steering around it, but didn't steer quite hard enough. Had we been 4 inches to the right, we would have missed it. As it was, we tagged it not too hard, our bumper actuated, detected the impact, we shifted to reverse, backed up a few meters and reoriented, then steered properly around the van. We dinged up the front of the Suburban slightly - nothing the grinder couldn't fix. We finished out that run clearing 4 out of 5 obstacles and a good score.

The van was in a difficult position for us - the course had you coming around a turn and there the van was before you got straightened back out and made the geometry a little weird, at least for us and our algorithms.

The hardest obstacle I thought was the tank trap. Our LIDAR intersected it at the criss-cross level and made the obstacle appear smaller than it really is, thus we tend to understeer when avoiding it.

Here you can see some low quality video of one of our runs here (taken with a digital still camera with MPG capability):

This has us entering the hay bail funnel before the tunnel, going through the tunnel, around the first parked rental car, on to the rough terrain section, down the long striaght and turning toward the van and clearing it this run (too far away to see clearly, though), then back around and finally to the final stretch where we clear the remaining obstacles and cross the finish. The mountain pass section is not shown because you couldn't see it very well from where the video was shot.

Our main obstacle sensor is a SICK LMS-291 LIDAR mounted at front bumper level. It works very well, has a range of about 40 meters. I wrote the obstacle avoidance code - it works pretty well most of the time, but is not perfect. The LIDAR can be dazzled by bright sunlight resulting in blind spots, but other than that, it is a fantastic sensor.

We were highly constrained by our budget so we really couldn't afford more LIDARs which are about $6000 each. SICK sold them to GC teams for $3000 each so at least we did not have to pay full price. We do have a second one mounted on top to sense the terrain profile in front of the truck, but we had some problems with it during the NQE and it was not running during these runs, so the front LIDAR was the only obstacle sensor we had. Had we had more budget, we probably would have had several mounted on top each at a slightly different angle to get a better terrain and obstacle picture. We saw many teams that used that configuration.

-Brian

Yes, Brian. That's the worst. Scoffing at it doesn't make it untrue. Vilifying the source reporting it there doesn't mean there weren't others. Violation of fair play and "the American way" means more to some than others. Cutting off people told they had (what was it?) 18 months when they were less than 18 months into a preparation, eliminating them by capricious, arbitrary standards not related to competition, even requiring the submission of white papers and submit to a "search" of their facilities as a condition to entry, based on having listened to many Supreme Court rulings to the best of my understanding of Constitutional law were illegal. Who knows what breakthroughs might have happened in the final days before performance? Was anything modified on your entry in the last five months? Eliminating anyone before the contest, from the competition, which offered public funds for demonstrating performance of a task at the contest, was an act of discrimination. I'm sorry that is a hard concept. But ridiculing it does not change its veracity.

Now, since I can't stand your condescending attitude, about something I take seriously, without feeling the strong need to reply in kind, I think instead I'll stop discussing this with you, with my closing comment: People often get the government they deserve, and that should scare the devil out of most of us.