March 14, 2004
A Soapbox Derby for the War-Games Set
By JOHN MARKOFFand JOHN M. BRODER
ARSTOW, Calif., March 13 — Fifteen robot vehicles took off across the Mojave Desert starting at dawn on Saturday, dodging boulders and 15-pound tortoises in search of a place in scientific history and $1 million in Pentagon cash.
In the end there was no winner and none of the machines came close to completing the 142-mile race, over some of the most forbidding terrain on the planet.
However, the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon skunk-works research agency that sponsored the event, insisted that despite wandering robots, a roll-over and other assorted crashes, technological progress was achieved that would lead to a world of robot drivers one day soon.
"You have to understand: this isn't a one-year event," said Eric Rasmussen, a Darpa program manager. "Next year everyone will be able to do the easy parts of the course and best entrants will go much farther."
At dawn the top qualifier, Carnegie Mellon University's Sandstorm, sped out of the starting gate at the SlashX ranch, south of Barstow, to the cheers of several thousand spectators, and quickly reached speeds well above 20 miles an hour.
However, Sandstorm's impressive speed soon outran its navigational skills. The red Hummer-based vehicle with a large globe-shaped vision system bounced through a fence and sheared off a post, careering forward at an alarming rate.
Within the first hour, the course began to take its toll. Sandstorm was one of the first casualties. Despite an investment of more than $3 million and with backers like Boeing and Intel, it went off course and got caught on an obstacle. The rubber on one of its front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished.
Shortly afterward, David, the entry from Ensco Inc. in Falls Church, Va., struck a bush and rolled over, leaking fuel. The Acura MDX entry from Palos Verdes High School in California failed to make a turn at the start, ran directly into a barrier and was out of the race.
Less than four hours after the race began, all vehicles had either crashed or been immobilized. Sandstorm proved to be the most successful robot, covering 7.4 miles, slightly farther than the vehicle built by the SciAutonics II team. The second-place entry was the joint effort of a team of off-road racers and aerospace engineers sponsored by Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of off-road vehicles. The SciAutonics vehicle managed to go 6.7 miles.
Third place went to Team Digital Auto Drive, led by Dave and Bruce Hall, two brothers who own a stereo speaker company in Morgan Hill, Calif. Their vehicle reached the six-mile mark, but after it was stopped to allow an emergency vehicle to pass, its global positioning system became confused.
The competition, announced a little more than a year ago, gave birth to some of the strangest contraptions ever built: computer-laden mechanical monstrosities that began life as golf carts, dune buggies, hybrids, luxury sport utility vehicles, all-terrain vehicles, a motorcycle and a 16-ton military truck.
The rules required the vehicles to traverse the course without human intervention. The Pentagon is trying to meet a Congressional mandate to convert a third of its battlefield vehicles to autonomous operation by 2015 to save soldiers' lives.
The Darpa race drew several thousand spectators this morning who sat in bleachers or were strung out along the first mile of the course.
None of those who attended appeared skeptical about the future of robots or robot vehicles. Offering a bit of the flavor of a high-technology Woodstock, the race drew some fervent true believers in the technology that is beginning to appear in household applications.
Wandering among the vehicles in the garage area on the night before the race, Joanne Pransky of Boca Raton, Fla., who describes herself as the world's first robotic psychiatrist, tried to find machines in need of counseling.
The Apple Computer co-founder Stephen Wozniak drove his satellite television-equipped Hummer to the event with his friend Dan Sokol, a Silicon Valley engineer who attended the first Homebrew Computer Club meeting with Mr. Wozniak in 1975. The club led directly to the creation of the personal computer industry.
"This has the smell of something big," Mr. Sokol said, "like Homebrew three decades ago or events that led to the Internet, which every one missed."
Major military contractors and computer companies backed some of the teams, but others had only their children's inheritances and hundreds of hours of sweat equity behind them.
The race attracted an assortment of dreamers, hucksters, high school hackers, off-road racers, BattleBot warriors, crackpots and visionaries. They devoted the better part of a year to their entries and spent $10,000 to $3.5 million. For most, the prize was a small part of it.
"I don't think the money is the motivation," said Anthony J. Tether, Darpa's director. "It has sparked an interest in science and technology in this country that we haven't seen since the 1960's with the Apollo program."
Mr. Tether said that while Darpa had spent $13 million so far on the competition, the contestants had invested as much as $65 million.
They included teams from Carnegie Mellon, the California Institute of Technology, the Oshkosh Truck Corporation and Ohio State University, which had big corporate sponsors.
But Darpa has a long tradition of financing blue-sky ideas, and the agency was hoping to find help from unexpected quarters, like Team LoGHIQ of Walden, N.Y., which invested about $10,000 in its hybrid, a garage project powered by a gas generator and electric motors.
Another shoestring entry was created by Warren Williams and Bill Zimmerly of Ballwin, Mo., Team Phantasm. They had less than $20,000 sunk into their entry.
"If we just had $100,000 more we could have had a competitive piece of equipment," said Mr. Williams, a machine tool calibrator by day and a garage rat by night. Like LoGHIQ, his entry, Ladibug, never made it past the starting gate, despite having been blessed by two Buddhist monks in orange robes from the Wat Thai, a temple in Los Angeles.
