Stanford wins the Grand Challenge

Ok, now we have a winner. It's taken them until today to make all the calculations about exactly how long it took each finalist to cross the finish line, but DARPA has officially declared Stanford Racing Team's Stanley, an autonomous Volkswagen Touareg R5, as the winner of this year's Grand Challenge. 

[MD @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

like i said before, Go Stanford!

[Rex StJames @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Now this is freekin' cool. Wonder why last time was such a flop, but this one was such a success?

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Go Stanford! Proving west coast engineering prowess yet again. :)

[ellie @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

what exactly is weblogs and engadget? Just started using this. Can someone help?

[Nabs @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

I bet KITT would've whooped it.

[Jake T @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Did anyone else finish in the allotted time or were they the only ones who qualified. I think I remember before no one has one because won have ever finish/finished in time.

[Chris @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

I don't get this...calculations?? Finish time - Start time right??

[G @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Ellie, engadget was started by a crackpot bunch of nyc hipsters. It's the google of the tech blogs! Those who don't know about it are like those people who kept using yahoo while all of us were using google.

[shadowhawk @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Much like a Road Rally race, each car is racing the clock in a staggered start. At different times in the race, different cars were stopped for safety reasons. This is why they 1)had to wait until all participants were done, and 2)they had to calculate different total elapsed times.
Way to go autonomous machines... but I'm not investing in SkyNet just yet...

[asurroca @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

#5 it was an offroad course. Not sure KITT would've survived it... well, unless they gave KITT a lift and some knobby offroad tires...

[Slo-Mo-Shun @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Now, take that s*** to West Coast Customs and put in some 20 inch rims/spinners and dozens of subs.

[JaXs @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

forget stanford yay VW

[Chris @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

#8 G,

Don't feed the bots. ;)

[oddsends @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

carnegie mellon red team must be kicking themselves for loosing by just a few minutes

[Alex @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

>Wonder why last time was such a flop, but this
>one was such a success?

I think it had to do with the fact that everyone had better software, and the hard part was at the very end of the course this time, instead of the very beginning.

[Mark @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

"carnegie mellon red team must be kicking themselves for loosing by just a few minutes"

Paraphrasing from the horse's mouth (www.redteamracing.org): they programmed H1ghlander to go all out to win, and Sandstorm to slog along carefully in the hopes of finishing. But the way things went down, H1ghlander wasn't on its game and ended up third, while Sandstorm slogged its way to nearly winning the race. Stanford set a pace just slightly faster than Sandstorm's, and that turned out to be enough to win.

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

#12 JaXs, I hope you realize that most of VW's advanced R&D goes on in conjunction with Stanford. So you can forget Stanford if you like, but that means saying bye bye to cool future technology in your VW. :)

[Carlos @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

"what exactly is weblogs and engadget? Just started using this. Can someone help?"

Engadget is a gadget/tech weblog featuring the likes of Ryan Block, Peter Rojas, Barb (I forgot her last name), and more. So yeah, I don't think it gets more popular and comprehensive than this blog.

But Weblogs Inc. is just company with like, sixty weblogs, that cover the leading consumer and public interests and topics (such as gadgetry (engadget), games (joystiq), hd beat (hd, duh), and tv squad (tv, again, duh).And as a company, they pay their bloggers to make interesting posts relevant to their primary subject and then sell advertising.

And yeah, I hope their doing well, because if that proves their is an effective business model on the internet in blogging and then still have it be a win for the end user (like this site).

I <3 Engadget.

---------------

Oh yeah, go Stanford.

[mpeng @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

engagdet plus parent blog is owned by AOL.

[hall @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Go VW!

[JC @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

#11, that Dodge Durango behind the VW looks like a race official's vehicle, I think it has people in it.

[Ryan gardner @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Stupid Stanford. They win at everything but Football and Basketball.

[PseudoKnight @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

"So the truck that finished right behind the volkswagon gets diddly squat? lol"

That wasn't a competitor autonomous vehicle. Every autonomous vehicle had another car following it just to keep it safe.

[uber0 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Do they have a 2006 competition?

[RS @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Sad, that there's almost no future for bright technicans like the Project-Manager of Stanley in Germany. Many of my friends left the country just after finishing their studies to continue their work in the states. Maybe we need some sort of Mega-Universites like Stanfod or Harvrad too? It looks like they can offer nice opportunities to good students even after they finished... But heck, on the other hand we can study for free ;).

[Ivan Kirigin @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Thrun, the head of the Project at Stanford, only got there recently from...CMU. This is why it should be stressed that PEOPLE make the team, not the school.

Another reason to praise individual teams is that DARPA barred any other DARPA related projects to use project money for the Grand Challenge. This sounds reasonable until you consider most profs at pleases like CMU have MANY projects. A single student works on a few things. A graduate student and advisor working on a DARPA project cannot use even part of their time working on the Grand Challenge. This is why so few people in the Field Robotics Center at CMU's Robotics Institude were working directly on the challenge.

The best news about all of this, though, is that the money isn't that important. If the technology works, this explodes into a BILLION dollar industry immediately.

[Kangstarr @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Don't forget KIIT in "SUPER-PURSUIT" mode. That one owned!~

[Mike Sullivan @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

CarTV followed the DARPA Grand Challenge from start to finish and has a series of great videos. Enjoy!

Here is a direct link to our videos:

http://www.cartv.com/content/research/channels/index.cfm/channel/CarTV_Motorsports_Videos/Megablurb/103

or just go to

www.CarTV.com

Thanks

Mike

[Lee @ Dec 19th 2005 12:20AM]

Five teams finished, although the last of those was over the ten hour time limit. The top four finishers were within an hour of each others' time. But it was finisher number five, Terramax, sixteen tons of robot fun, which is ready to be shipped to Iraq today for use in a support role. Go to www.terramax.com and look at the videos to see part of the race as seen thru the windshield of Terramax.

[Woody @ Dec 29th 2005 3:33PM]

Kudos to all the competitors; this was a tough race.



Go private industry! Team Red (a/k/a Carnegie-Mellon) and Stanford had the benefit of multi-million dollar subsidies and free student labor. Gray Team and Team TerraMax were the only other two finishers (and Team TerraMax was 51 minutes over the finish time). So...



Go Gray Team!



Woody