One of the more interesting programs to appear on public television recently was NOVA’s entertaining and informative program on the DARPA’s 2005 Grand Challenge, dubbed The Great Robot Race.
The event itself — sponsored by DARPA in an effort to further development of autonomous vehicles for possible use in future robotic military hardware — was held on Saturday, October 8th, 2005. Five vehicles out of the 23 finalists managed to complete the challenging 131.2 mile road course, wiith Stanford’s VW Touareg-based “Stanley” taking home top honors and the $2 million grand prize.
You can now view the NOVA program online in its entirety here. For more information on the challenge, visit the DARPA and Stanford websites as well. – [Jeff James]
I think it was actually 5 vehicles that finished the race. Standford came in first, the next 2 vehicles to come in where by the same team, the “Red Team”. The final 2 to come in were by 2 smaller teams, one group from New Orleans and the other a group of 2 gentleman known as the “DAD” team. Anyway it was a great NOVA, very neat to see the technologies used. I liked Standford’s approach the best for ‘coolness factor’ and was very happy to see them win.
Thanks for the correction, Gnome. I believe three vehicles crossed the finish line on October 8th, then the last two did so on the 9th.
I’ll edit the original post.
Thanks -
- Jeff
The 5 teams that finished were Stanford, Red Team, Red Team Too, Grey Team, and Team TerraMax (which finished, but not in 10 hours).
Brian