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When Michelle Gittleman returned from maternity leave to her job at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh more than two years ago, her boss told her that their new plan was to win a robot race.
"I was like, 'What are you talking about?' The idea of a robot race seemed very science-fiction," she says.
But to her boss, Red Whittaker, considered a leader in the field of robotics, this was the land-on-the-moon kind of chance for robotics that he had been waiting for.
The script for the race went like this: Be the first vehicle to complete a 132-mile course through the Nevada desert in under 10 hours. The catch: The vehicle must be completely self-driving: no passengers, no remote control operation. Just an empty vehicle that has to judge, guide, and steer itself through the Mojave Desert.
Sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the hub of research for the Pentagon, the DARPA Grand Challenge robot race was created to spur technology and development in autonomous vehicles, in particular convoys used by the U.S. military. The winning team in the challenge is given a hefty $2 million check.
A one-hour PBS special, NOVA's "The Great Robot Race," airing tonight, chronicles the race and teams in the 2005 race, which was the second Grand Challenge conducted by DARPA.
Viewers will see the different approaches and personalities of the robot's creators, from Whittaker's army-like team of students waking up at 4 a.m. to examine the racecourse to a lone Berkeley graduate student and his small team's creation, Ghostrider, the only driverless motorcycle in the race.
Whittaker, director of the Field Robotics Center at CMU, says that when he hears about things like the Grand Challenge, he "can't not do them."
For more than two years now, he and a team of volunteers and CMU students at times worked around the clock to prepare for the challenge.
Gittleman, project manager for the Red Team, says that for a brief time there was even a "Red Team widows get-together" for abandoned spouses of some of the team members. She says her husband attended some of them.
What emerged from their work were two robots: Sandstorm and Highlander.
Sandstorm is a veteran of the first race, in March 2004, and was the only one that year to go more than 7 miles from the finish line before having to stop. It wasn't the 132 miles that was hoped for, but Whittaker says that race was the one "that started it all" and helped jump-start the competition.
Once the basics of creating a driverless robot were understood, Whitaker says, teams could perfect the technical and developmental sides. It worked, because in the second race in October 2005, five teams completed the course, four of them in fewer than 10 hours.
Sebastian Thrun, leader of the Stanford Racing Team, whose robot Stanley won the 2005 Grand Challenge, says the idea behind his team's vehicle is fairly simple.
Sensors mounted on the roof of the vehicle scan and analyze the terrain. That information is relayed to computers that process the data and decide what actions the vehicle should take, says Thrun, who also is director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Congress has asked that one-third of military vehicles be driverless by 2015, though it is hard to predict a time frame for when autonomous vehicles will be in use by troops, says Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for DARPA.
Walker and some team members say the military has shown interest in what the vehicles demonstrated at the Grand Challenge. But what happens next will be up to the military, she says.
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