DARPA Grand Challenge
Fully autonomous vehicles have been an international pursuit for many years, from endeavors in Japan (starting in 1977), Germany (Ernst Dickmanns and VaMP), Italy (the ARGO Project), the European Union (EUREKA Prometheus Project), the United States of America, and other countries.
The U.S. Congress authorized DARPA to offer prize money ($1 million) for the first Grand Challenge to facilitate robotic development, with the ultimate goal of making one-third of ground military forces autonomous by 2015.
The first competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was held on March 13, 2004 in the Mojave Desert region of the United States, along a 150-mile (240 km) route that follows along the path of Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California–Nevada border in Primm.
Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team and car Sandstorm (a converted Humvee) traveled the farthest distance, completing 11.78 km (7.32 mi) of the course before getting hung up on a rock after making a switchback turn.
The huge truck spent the night idling on the course, but was particularly nimble in carefully picking its way down the narrow roads of Beer Bottle Pass.
At least one team, Tartan Racing, enhanced the maps through the insertion of additional extrapolated waypoints for improved navigation.
The second-place finisher earning the $1 million prize was the Stanford Racing Team with their entry "Junior", a 2006 Volkswagen Passat.
Coming in third place was team VictorTango, winning the $500,000 prize with their 2005 Ford Escape hybrid, "Odin".
The Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course.
Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection.
The primary goal of the program is to develop ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments.
Since the beginning of the first FANG Challenge on January 14, 2013, more than 1,000 participants within more than 200 teams used the META design tools and the VehicleFORGE collaboration platform developed by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, to design and simulate the performance of thousands of potential mobility and drivetrain subsystems.
The goal of the FANG program is to test the specially developed META design tools, model libraries and the VehicleFORGE platform, which were created to significantly compress the design-to-production time of a complex defense system.
Such areas can be difficult and dangerous for humans, making robotic teams a desirable option for exploration and search and rescue operations.
The Challenge was meant to help close gaps in four technical areas: autonomy, perception, networking and mobility.
The SubT Challenge consisted of four events, the Tunnel Circuit (August 2019), which was held at an experimental mine in Pittsburgh, PA; the Urban Circuit (February 2020), which featured an abandoned nuclear power plant in Elma, WA; the Cave Circuit (November 2020), which was held virtual only due to the COVID-19 Pandemic; and the Final Event (September 2021), which featured elements from all three domains (tunnel urban underground, and natural cave networks was held in Louisville, KY.[22] Teams came from 11 countries (Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, England, Germany, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States) and 20 universities.
Robots with wheels or treads can carry heavier payloads, including large batteries, and operate for a longer time.
The Challenge was announced on 18 April 2018,[29] and on 10 April 2019,[30] three finalist teams who would be attempting to launch rockets were announced: Virgin Orbit, Vector Launch and Astra (although at the time it was not published that the third finalist was Astra; the company was referred only as a "stealth startup").
[32] The final remaining team, Astra, attempted to launch their Astra Rocket 3.0 for the Challenge from Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska in late February and early March 2020, but several launch attempts were all called off due to weather and technical difficulties.
[33] A technology paper and source code for the computer vision machine learning component of the 2005 Stanford entry has been published.
[34][35] 2007 Urban Challenge teams employed a variety of different software and hardware combinations for interpreting sensor data, planning, and execution.
