DARPA Grand Challenge (2007)

The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge^[1], known as the "Urban Challenge", took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logistics Airport), in Victorville, California (Google map), in the West of the United States.^[2]

Overview

The $2 million winner was Tartan Racing, a collaborative effort by Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors Corporation, with their vehicle "Boss", a Chevy Tahoe. The second place finisher earning the $1 million prize was the Stanford Racing Team with their entry "Junior", a 2006 Volkswagen Passat. Coming in third place was team Victor Tango from Virginia Tech winning the $500,000 prize with their 2005 Ford Escape hybrid, "Odin".^[3] The course involved a 96 km (60-mile) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules included obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. While the 2004 and 2005 events were more physically challenging for the vehicles, the robots operated in isolation and did not encounter other vehicles on the course. The Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection. ^[4] The event is being followed closely by auto manufacturers for the implications it holds for smarter cars and safer highways in the future. Unlike the past two challenges, DARPA announced that some teams were to receive development funding, based on proposals submitted to DARPA. Eleven teams could receive up to US$1 million a piece under this special program track (Track A) [2]. These 11 teams largely represent major universities and large corporate interests such as CMU teaming with GM, Stanford teaming with Volkswagen, Virginia Tech teaming with TORC Technologies, Oshkosh Truck, Honeywell, Raytheon, Caltech, Autonomous Solutions, Cornell, and MIT. One of the few independent entries in Track A is the Golem Group.

A vehicle being developed for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge

Basic Rules for 2007

• Vehicle must be stock or have a documented safety record.
• Vehicle must obey the California state driving laws.
• Vehicle must be entirely autonomous, using only the information it detects with its sensors and public signals such as GPS.
• DARPA will provide the route network 24 hours before the race starts.
• Vehicles will complete the route by driving between specified checkpoints.
• DARPA will provide a file detailing the order the checkpoints must be driven to 5 minutes before the race start.
• Vehicles may “stop and stare” for at most 10 seconds.
• Vehicles must operate in rain and fog, with GPS blocked.
• Vehicles must avoid collision with vehicles and other objects such as carts, bicycles, traffic barrels, and objects in the environment such as utility poles.
• Vehicles must be able to operate in parking areas and perform U-turns as required by the situation.

Initial site visits

In June/July 2007, 53 teams (see list below) were notified that they qualified for DARPA Site visits. Those teams that were successful in these evaluations moved on to a national qualifying event that took place in October 2007.

Semi-finalists

On August 9, 2007, after completing the site visits, DARPA announced^[5] the 36 semi-finalists selected to participate in the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) that took place October 26-31, 2007. Originally, the top 20 teams from that event were scheduled to proceed to the final competition on November 3, however only 11 teams were selected. The 36 semifinalists were:

National Qualification Event

Diagram of qualification area A

The National Qualification Event for the 2007 challenge occurred between October 26th and 31st, 2007. 35 teams were selected to participate in this semifinal round. The qualifying rounds included 3 areas: A, B, and C. Area A was a test of the robots' ability to merge. A 2-way loop of human traffic (provided by professional stunt drivers) surrounded a one-way road running from one side of the loop to the other. Robots had to go from the one-way road, make a left turn into traffic, follow the loop 180 degrees, and make another left turn onto the one-way road again. If a robot ever made a move considered unsafe by the drivers, they^{[attribution needed]} would honk. Robots were free to make as many laps as they could in the allotted time. Area B was mostly closed to spectators except for the start and finish, and involved the robots navigating a long suburban route demonstrating parking, navigation, and avoiding stalled cars along the way. In Area C, robots performed several loops into a 4-way intersection in order to test their implementation of 4-way stops. Each loop, human drivers would provide a progressively more difficult intersection situation. At some points in Area C, roads would be blocked to test robots' ability to re-plan routes. On October 30, 2007, 6 teams were eliminated from the NQE by DARPA for poor performance to free up test slots for the remaining 29 teams. These teams were Georgia Tech/SAIC Sting Racing, Ody-Era, SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering, Team Berlin, University of Utah and Princeton University.^[6]. On October 31, 2007, 8 more teams were eliminated from the NQE. The teams eliminated were Caltech, Mojavaton, Team Jefferson, Team Urbanator, Gator Nation, Team Juggernaut, Axion Racing and Golem Group. ^[7] On November 1, 2007 it was announced that there would be only 11 teams competing in the Urban Challenge. ^[8][9] The 11 teams selected to compete are the following:

1. AnnieWay
2. Ben Franklin
3. CarOLO
4. Cornell
5. Intelligent Vehicle Systems
6. MIT
7. Stanford Racing
8. Tartan Racing
9. Team Oshkosh
10. Team UCF
11. Victor Tango

DARPA's reasoning for only qualifying 11 teams was primarily safety-related. DARPA felt that since there would be real humans near the robots in the traffic cars as well as DARPA officials scoring robot performance, then safety was paramount.^[10].

Finals

Starting Area: 34.5846° N 117.369° W^[11] The final event for the Darpa Urban Challenge took place on November 3, 2007, and included all 11 teams which made it past the semi-final National Qualification Event. The event was broadcast on a live webcast via the DARPA Urban Challenge website, narrated by Marty Reid (racing sportscaster) and Grant Imahara (of MythBusters acclaim), with "sideline reporting" by Jamie Hyneman (also of Mythbusters). ^[12] The final event consisted of three missions, approximately 55 miles in total, given to each team. A team's score for each mission was computed by taking the total time taken to complete the mission, and adding and subtracting penalties and bonuses. Penalties were assessed for excessive delay, violating traffic rules, exhibiting dangerous behavior, etc. Vehicles were frequently manually paused for safety reasons; if a vehicle was not the root cause of such a pause then the duration of the pause was not counted in its final score. In order to officially complete the race, a vehicle's adjusted time for the three missions must be under six hours^[13]. Six autonomous vehicle teams finished the event; Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Tech, Ben Franklin Racing, MIT, and Cornell. On November 4, CMU's Boss was named the winner, followed by Stanford's Junior, then Virginia Tech's Odin, and MIT's Talos^[14]. Final adjusted scores for the six vehicles were not announced.

Race Participants & Results

References