DARPA Grand Challenge

Posted 7 Aug 2002 at 00:44 UTC by steve

DARPA is sponsoring a new robot competition with a one million dollar prize called the DARPA Grand Challenge. The contest, to take place in 2004, will be a race between autonomous robots to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. Robots will have to navigate both on-road and off-road. All robots must be fully autonomous ground based designs. Humans assistance even for refueling or repair is not allowed. The new competition was first mentioned in a UPI story covering the DARPATECH 2002 conference. Should be interesting.

On-Road Info, posted 7 Aug 2002 at 19:39 UTC by steve » (Master)

I've gotten a number of questions about how the on-road portions are to be handled (public roads, private roads, etc.) so I emailed DARPA and here's the response:

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 16:22:09 -0400, mmulqueen(contr-ato) wrote:
>The race will be partially on public roads that have been closed
>to non race traffic.
>
>-Mike Mulqueen