A Pentagon sponsored robot race at a former Air Force base in Victorville, California, took place on Saturday in the final event of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Urban Challenge. The race consisted in a 60 miles course in a simulated city that had to be finished in less than six hours.
The race proofed that even robots have problems, with crashes and traffic jams occurring. The event was the third since 2004, when this kind of races began. The races are aimed to replace a third of the military fleet of logistics vehicles with robots by 2015, in compliance with a Congressional directive.
The contestants remained only 11 out of the 35 that were in the final. Cars from Volkswagen Passat, a Subaru, a Chevrolet Tahoe, a Toyota Prius, a Land Rover, a Ford Escape Hybrid, and an oversize Marine Corps transport vehicle made by Oshkosh took part in the race that offered three prizes of 2 million dollars, 1 million dollars and half a million dollars.
Additional, the race required 20.5 million dollars to be set up only this year.
The vehicles are all equipped with high technology sensors and computers that are programmed to follow a certain route, to avoid oncoming traffic and to perform every action that is required in a operation through traffic, including cheating on the rules in order to escape a difficult situation.
However, a Land Rover designed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a near collision and then a real collision with a Passat built by a team of researchers based in Braunschweig, Germany, a car that was eventually pulled out of the race.
Also, the Oshkosh military vehicle was pulled out after previously being close to hitting a pillar and the car that was made by the University of Central Florida crashed into an abandoned building.
The car made by the Stanford Racing Team crossed the finish line first, but it just won the second prize, due to the fact that not all the cars began the race at the same time. Thus, Carnegie Mellon University’s car won the race.
