A Terminator Reality? You betcha! -Ed
By day, Seth Cabe is a manufacturing engineer for a mannequin maker. By night, he's working on what could become the battlefield vehicle of the future.
Cabe, leader of Team Loghiq, is one of a number of engineers, researchers and robot aficionados who have signed up for the DARPA Grand Challenge, a contest designed to generate ideas that ideally will lead to the development of self-driving combat vehicles.
Put simply, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) will give $1 million to the team whose robotic car drives itself the fastest from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, on an off-road course. The race, which must be won within 10 hours, will take place on March 13 next year.
The hard part is that the 250-mile course--which won't be revealed until two hours before the start--will require the computerized vehicles to drive through or around sand, mud, boulders, ditches, barbed wire, mountains and at least one overpass where onboard global positioning systems (GPS) for navigation won't work. (Except to send commands for an emergency stop and restart, the teams can't interfere with the driving.)
So though the vehicles are expected to travel at an average of 25 miles per hour, and to hit 50mph or more at times, they have to be capable of swerving or stopping suddenly.
"The major challenge, other than fundraising, is real-time obstacle detection and avoidance. It simply doesn't exist right now as an off-the-shelf item," said Team Loghiq's Cabe.
Like other contestants, Cabe harbors doubts that any machine can meet DARPA's challenge. However, he's taking part anyway. "I'm an engineer. I can't stay away from projects like this," he said.
The competition grew out of a U.S. Defense Department mandate to increase the use of technology in the field. The agency wants one-third of all combat vehicles to be able to operate unmanned by 2015, according to Don Shipley, a spokesman for the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Autonomous flying vehicles, such as the drones used in the Gulf War and in combat in Yemen, are already being used by the U.S. military.
Congress authorized the contest format a few years ago. "The idea is to attract fresh thinking on the subject, to get beyond the Lockheeds and the Grummans," Shipley said, referring to military contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
DARPA will hold future contests involving different types of vehicles and technological challenges, he added.
Although the government agency came up with initial rules, it changed these after getting feedback from the 34 registered participants. Earlier, the rules stated that the vehicles couldn't be human-controlled machines. One participant asked if that meant it would be OK to get a chimp to drive. Now, the rules state no living thing can control a contestant vehicle.
Some vehicles are being designed specially for the race. Others are retrofits of existing vehicles. For example, theArctic Tortoise, sponsored by the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, is a 1992 Jeep Cherokee with sensors, beefy shock absorbers and a bevy of computers.
Source:
http://msnbc-cnet.com.com/2100-1008...&part=msnbc&tag=alert&form=feed&subj=cnetnews
By day, Seth Cabe is a manufacturing engineer for a mannequin maker. By night, he's working on what could become the battlefield vehicle of the future.
Cabe, leader of Team Loghiq, is one of a number of engineers, researchers and robot aficionados who have signed up for the DARPA Grand Challenge, a contest designed to generate ideas that ideally will lead to the development of self-driving combat vehicles.
Put simply, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) will give $1 million to the team whose robotic car drives itself the fastest from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, on an off-road course. The race, which must be won within 10 hours, will take place on March 13 next year.
The hard part is that the 250-mile course--which won't be revealed until two hours before the start--will require the computerized vehicles to drive through or around sand, mud, boulders, ditches, barbed wire, mountains and at least one overpass where onboard global positioning systems (GPS) for navigation won't work. (Except to send commands for an emergency stop and restart, the teams can't interfere with the driving.)
So though the vehicles are expected to travel at an average of 25 miles per hour, and to hit 50mph or more at times, they have to be capable of swerving or stopping suddenly.
"The major challenge, other than fundraising, is real-time obstacle detection and avoidance. It simply doesn't exist right now as an off-the-shelf item," said Team Loghiq's Cabe.
Like other contestants, Cabe harbors doubts that any machine can meet DARPA's challenge. However, he's taking part anyway. "I'm an engineer. I can't stay away from projects like this," he said.
The competition grew out of a U.S. Defense Department mandate to increase the use of technology in the field. The agency wants one-third of all combat vehicles to be able to operate unmanned by 2015, according to Don Shipley, a spokesman for the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Autonomous flying vehicles, such as the drones used in the Gulf War and in combat in Yemen, are already being used by the U.S. military.
Congress authorized the contest format a few years ago. "The idea is to attract fresh thinking on the subject, to get beyond the Lockheeds and the Grummans," Shipley said, referring to military contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
DARPA will hold future contests involving different types of vehicles and technological challenges, he added.
Although the government agency came up with initial rules, it changed these after getting feedback from the 34 registered participants. Earlier, the rules stated that the vehicles couldn't be human-controlled machines. One participant asked if that meant it would be OK to get a chimp to drive. Now, the rules state no living thing can control a contestant vehicle.
Some vehicles are being designed specially for the race. Others are retrofits of existing vehicles. For example, theArctic Tortoise, sponsored by the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, is a 1992 Jeep Cherokee with sensors, beefy shock absorbers and a bevy of computers.
Source:
http://msnbc-cnet.com.com/2100-1008...&part=msnbc&tag=alert&form=feed&subj=cnetnews