Just months after awarding $2 million for a sport utility vehicle that drove itself over more than 100 miles of open road, the Pentagon on Monday unveiled a bigger, richer challenge for self-driving vehicles that can negotiate city traffic.
Veterans of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency's earlier "Grand Challenges" said the technologies developed for the next contest will clearly benefit the U.S. military, which has set the goal of automating a third of its ground vehicles by 2015. But they said the innovations could have an even bigger impact on driving in America.
"It might fundamentally alter the way we use our highways and save trillions of dollars," said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford University computer-science professor whose team won the Grand Challenge race last October...
This time around, autonomous vehicles would run a simulated military supply mission in a mock urban area. To succeed, the vehicles would have to complete a 60-mile course safely in less than six hours, obeying traffic laws and avoiding obstacles while they merge with moving traffic, negotiate intersections and even pull into and back out of parking spaces.
"Grand Challenge 2005 proved that autonomous ground vehicles can travel significant distances and reach their destination, just as you or I would drive from one city to the next," DARPA Director Tony Tether said in Monday's announcement (.pdf). "After the success of this event, we believe the robotics community is ready to tackle vehicle operation inside city limits..."
...Thrun suggested that autonomously driven passenger vehicles could revolutionize transportation:
* The development of safe, self-driving vehicles could drastically reduce the average annual traffic death toll of 42,000 Americans.
* The carrying capacity of the nation's highways could be dramatically raised from the current level of 8 percent, expressed in terms of the area actually occupied by vehicles.
* Commuters could relax or work during their average drive time of an hour a day.
* Children could conceivably have themselves driven to school or soccer practice, with a safety-conscious robot behind the wheel instead of a harried human.
Whittaker agreed that, in the long run, civilians could benefit from Urban Challenge technologies at least as much as the military.
"That's an inevitable future in the automotive industry," he said. "It could be that the automotive consumer will be the one who's the big winner."
Not to mention the great mark up the industry would be able to charge for a robotic computer to run your car for you.
Not to mention the potential Homeland Security applications for robots that noted where ever you went, who ever rode with you, and took you only to places you were cleared to go.
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2 comments:
I want my robot car!
The bizarre thing? It is actually cheaper to have humans do the dangerous runs. Humans are cheap. Those robot vehicles? Expensive.
We don't like to talk about it, but they calculate the price of getting someone to do this vs. a robot. Humans have a lower price, plus they are self replicating!
Yes, Mr. Spocko, but not everyone's like you and able to hack a robot's program to get it to do whatever you want.
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