CMU wins the Urban Challenge

According to a Popular Mechanics article, the Tartan racing team from CMU won DARPA's Urban Challenge leaving competitor Stanford in second place. Third place went to the Virginia Tech team. Remember that in the past, CMU and Stanford finished in the first two places during the 2nd Grand Challenge with Stanford taking home first prize. CMU will collect $2 million dollars from DARPA for the win and Stanford another $1 million while Virginia Tech will enjoy $500 thousand.

The cars were able to drive autonomously for 6 hours sharing the road with human drivers. DARPA's scoring of the event is not publicly known but apparently CMU finished the course 20 minutes faster than Stanford.

Don't expect to find cars autonomously driving around town any time soon though. Most of the sensor packs used in the event are too large and clumsy to be mounted on a regular vehicle; not to mention that further study is necessary in terms of safety. Would the cars still be able to perform in rainy weather and icy roads? Even for military use there is still lots of work to be done. I bet most of these vehicles would fail badly if one of the many sensors were to be damaged. It would be easy for a soldier to render one of the vehicles useless by shooting at the sensor array.

Still, the ease with which teams completed the challenge is a testament to the great advances in AI and robotics during the last decade. I expect that in another 10 years autonomous machines will be an integral part of our daily life similar to the way the Internet had penetrated our daily routine. It is great to be involved in robotics and artificial intelligence during such an exciting period of time.

The final results and additional information about the Urban Challenge are available at the official website here.