DARPA Prize Competitions

A year later, on October 8, 2005, the Stanford Racing Team won the $2 million prize during the second competition of the Grand Challenge in the desert Southwest near the California/Nevada state line.

[3] DARPA Urban Challenge (2007) required the competitors to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic and performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking, and negotiating intersections.

The University of California at Santa Barbara team won a $50,000 prize for crushing 180 digitally manufactured (DM) titanium mesh spheres with the most accurate predictive model of the components’ properties.

[9][10] DARPA UAVForge Challenge (2011-2012) was to build and test a user-intuitive, backpack-portable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could quietly fly in and out of critical environments to conduct sustained surveillance for up to three hours.

[11][12] DARPA Cash for Locating & Identifying Quick Response Codes (CLIQR) Quest Challenge (2012) explored the role the Internet and social media played in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge offered $40,000 to the first individual or team that could locate seven posters appearing in U.S. cities bearing the DARPA logo and a quick response code (QR) within 15 days.

DARPA decided not to proceed with the second and third competitions as originally planned and transitioned the technologies to the defense and commercial industry through the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII).

[27] DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge (2017-2021) was to develop robotic technologies to map, navigate, search and exploit complex underground environments.

[39][40] In March 2024, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) partnered with DARPA, contributing an additional $20 million to the competition's prize pool to address software vulnerabilities in medical devices, hospital IT, and biotech equipment.

[44] DARPA and ARPA-H tested all 42 submissions by running them through various open-source coding projects with deliberately injected vulnerabilities and scored the tools based on their effectiveness in identifying and fixing security flaws.