| Archive for TomboT www.tombot.net Beam robotics @ liverpool university |
| JennyBond |
Darpa Challenge contenderThe newest entry to a yearly robot desert race - a customised sports utility vehicle - could go further than any autonomous vehicle yet, after clocking hundreds of autonomous kilometres in practice.
The DARPA Grand Challenge, organised by the US government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, pits driverless vehicles against one another in a daring dash across a 280-kilometre stretch of hazardous Californian desert. The winner must complete the course in less than 10 hours in order to scoop the $2 million prize. The vehicles must run the whole race without a human driver, autonomously identifying and steering around corners or unexpected dangers, such as boulders or ditches. No vehicle completed the course in 2004 event, which saw a number of competitors crash spectacularly and some struggle to make it from the starting line after malfunctioning. The most successful vehicle was a modified Humvee built at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, which completed 12 km before being deactivated close to a cliff edge. 
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