Stanford team clinches top spot in robot desert race
Stanford team clinches top spot in robot desert race – Reed Stevenson (Reuters)
PRIMM, Nevada (Reuters) – A Stanford University team won a $2 million prize on Sunday for sending a modified Volkswagen across 132 miles of rugged desert, guided only by sensors and computers in a race the Pentagon hopes will lead to a technological breakthrough in warfare.
Twenty-three driverless vehicles were sent into the Mojave Desert on Saturday in a race sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.
After extending the race a day to allow a slow-moving robotic vehicle to finish, the Stanford University vehicle, known as Stanley, was declared the winner of the Grand Challenge with the quickest race time of six hours and 54 minutes.
Doesn’t look like NASCAR will have anything to worry about soon, though some improvements in distance have been made with the winner going 132 miles. It seems to me that the winner of the last one of these I remember reading about only made it about a mile.
NASCAR, no, but remember the “Johnny Cabs” in Total Recall? I see it!