如果要給這樣的競賽一個中文名稱，那最合適的名字是什麼？
「無人駕駛車越野賽」？
就姑且這麼翻吧 :)
文章轉自The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/business/14robot.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib
Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: September 14, 2005
FLORENCE, Ariz. - Cresting a hill on a gravel road at a brisk 20 miles an
hour, a driverless, computer-controlled Volkswagen Touareg plunges smartly
into a swale. When its laser guidance system spots an overhanging limb, it
lurches violently left and right before abruptly swerving off the road.
Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford roboticist, with a vehicle that he plans to enter
in an unmanned race in October.
With their robotic Touareg, known as Stanley, impaled in the brush, the two
passengers - Sebastian Thrun and Michael Montemerlo, both Stanford computer
scientists - pull off their crash helmets and scramble out to untangle the
machine.
A quick survey reveals that the sport utility vehicle is covered with debris,
but the bug-eyed laser, radar and optical vision system on top of the vehicle
is undamaged. So Stanley and its passengers continue on their way, over 50
miles of dirt road through a cactus-covered landscape, in the final weeks of
preparation for the second round of the Pentagon's great race.
It has been almost 18 months since the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, first attracted a motley array of
autonomous vehicles with a prize of $1 million for the first to complete a
142-mile desert course from Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas. The most
successful robot, developed by a Carnegie Mellon University team, managed all
of seven miles.
With the next running scheduled for Oct. 8 - and this time a $2 million purse
for the winner among 43 entries - it is clear that many of the participants
have made vast progress. For some researchers, it is an indication of a
significant transformation in what has been largely a science fiction fantasy.
"Computers are starting to sprout legs and move around in the environment,"
said Andy Rubin, a Silicon Valley technologist and a financial backer of this
year's Stanford Racing Team, which produced Stanley. Mr. Rubin, who tinkers
with robots himself, was the co-founder of Danger Inc., which created the
Sidekick hand-held.
The Pentagon agency, known as Darpa, struck upon the idea of a race - calling
it the Grand Challenge - as a way to stimulate innovations useful in
battlefield applications like unmanned logistics vehicles.
For the two Stanford scientists, however, the Grand Challenge is about
something larger. "The military are interested in more potent weapons, and by
itself that's a bad answer," said Mr. Thrun, a roboticist and director of the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His broader goal is to advance
robotics as a science and explore applications ranging from aids for the
elderly to basic advances in intelligent computerized systems.
Several years ago, when Mr. Thrun was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and Mr.
Montemerlo was a graduate student, they helped develop a prototype of a
mobile robotic companion for the home that used natural-language voice
commands and was able to provide useful information taken from the Internet
like weather and television schedules.
There are a myriad of other possible applications for their software, which
can reason about the immediate environment; distinguish sky from ground, road
and trees; and make lightning-quick decisions.
Already in the automotive industry, intelligent cruise control has become
more adept at automatically maintaining the spacing between cars, and
intelligent lane-change and collision-avoidance software is close to being a
reality. Robots are routinely used in manufacturing, and in Japan a
three-foot-tall "house sitter" robot that can recognize 10,000 words and 10
different faces will go on sale in September, offered by Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries.
In the Darpa contest, though, the proving ground is not the home but the
desert. And several of the contestants, who range from garage hackers to
teams from giant automotive and aerospace corporations, say this year's
course is expected to be even more difficult than last year's.
The exact course will be secret until just hours before the event begins, but
Darpa officials are said to believe that the original test was too much an
exercise in automatically following global positioning satellite "bread
crumbs" - the data points outlining the route that are given to the
contestants shortly before the race begins.
So this year the course is likely to include unexpected man-made obstacles
and other hurdles that would be trivial for a human driver, but vexing for
the computer-controlled navigational systems that are at the heart of the
technical challenge the Pentagon has laid out.
Despite the added complexity, there is a widespread expectation among
robotics researchers that this time the course will be completed.
The machines, many of which wandered seemingly randomly in the desert last
year, have benefited from more than a year's experience as well as a
significant rush in improvement in every aspect of robotic vehicle
technology. And on a hot August day in the desert here, it was clear that the
field of artificial intelligence has made significant strides.
The increasing power of the technology was evident during the testing of the
Stanford Racing Team's robotic Touareg, which looks unexceptional from the
outside except for a festoon of sensors and the slogan "Drivers Not Required"
on its side, a play on Volkswagen's "Drivers Needed" slogan.
Stanley was able to complete a 47-mile dirt-road course here - strewn with
potholes, tight turns, puddles and lined with boulders, foot-high berms and
cactuses - with only two "incidents," which in Mr. Thrun's scientific
vernacular is when his robot does something unplanned, like leaving the road.
When their Touareg swerved abruptly in a roadside thicket, the team was quite
certain why.
The previous evening Mr. Thrun had persuaded Mr. Montemerlo to remove an
irritating software module, which forced the car to brake rapidly after
swerving to avoid an obstacle. Without the module, at speed the Touareg
fishtailed on the desert road and plunged into the brush before Mr. Thrun,
sitting in the driver's seat with his hand on a large red "E-Stop" button,
could react.
Back inside the Touareg, Mr. Montemerlo, seated in the rear seat with a
laptop computer that is networked to the seven mobile Intel Pentium
processors that comprise Stanley's control logic, fiddles with the software
and reinserts the problematic code. Now the vehicle will behave more
cautiously, although the hard braking will be a little uncomfortable for its
human passengers.
[After fixing two software bugs, the Stanford team managed to put Stanley
through the entire test course on Sept. 7 without crashing.]
In the actual race, of course, there will be no passengers along for the
ride. The teams will be able to follow a short distance behind, but will have
no communication with their vehicles.
For the two researchers, who have been leading a team of 60 developers from
Stanford and Volkswagen, the hiccup is all part of the process of trying to
create machines that can mimic what human drivers do effortlessly.
The challenge is heightened by the obvious rivalry that the two scientists
feel with their alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. This year, the Carnegie Mellon
Red Team - led by the roboticist William L. Whittaker, known to all as Red -
is testing two robotic vehicles, Sandstorm and H1ghlander, in the Nevada
desert.
With an array of sponsors including Caterpillar, Intel, Boeing, Harris,
Google, and Hummer's manufacturer, AM General, Mr. Whittaker's team is once
again the favorite.
For decades Mr. Whittaker has been one of the most passionate advocates of
robotic vehicles. Despite being bitterly disappointed last year, when
Sandstorm edged off the course after almost completing the most difficult
section of the route, he is confident that more than one team will succeed
this year.
"I would love it if the high school kids won this year," he said, in a
reference to a team from Palos Verdes High School in California, which is
backed by Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Analog Devices, Goodyear and others.
Whether or not one of the vehicles arrives at the finish line this year, Mr.
Whittaker says the credibility problems that have dogged the field are
largely in the past.
Of the event, which will begin this year near a rough-and-tumble bar south of
Barstow, he said, "I don't know whether it's going to be more like Lindbergh
landing in Paris or more like Woodstock."
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