Stanford University wins DARPA Grand Challenge race for robots - five complete course

It all started at 4AM Saturday when DARPA revealed the race route to the teams for the very first time. The teams could then review the course against their own maps to determine strategy for the race. At 6:40 AM, the Red Team's H1ghlander left the starting gate. Stanley from the Stanford Racing Team started five minutes later and the Red Team's Sandstorm five minutes after that.

As in the very similar format employed by car rallys, though the cars are effectively competing against each other, they are racing the clock, so the order on course is not necessarily the order of performance. You can start last and still win the race. To make it even more complicated, the race officials can tell the robot to pause to avoid congestion on the course, and when the dust had settled at the end of the day, we knew that the race had been run and won, but we weren’t sure which of the four teams would take the prize because “pause time” is not counted in the official vehicle time and so everybody held their breath (because the leaderboard was not accounting for the pauses).

H1ghlander had the lead early on. It came through the 68 mile point about seven minutes ahead of Stanley. But around the 100 mile mark, Stanley pulled past H1ghlander in a dry lake bed, and the crowd just went wild. By passing H1ghlander, Stanley showed that it was not only ahead, but at least five minutes ahead. When it finished 20 minutes ahead of H1ghlander (unofficially), it was really a 25 minute lead.

To complicate matters, Sandstorm was paused several times to avoid running too close to H1ghlander (Stanley had already passed it). There are only a few passing stretches in the route, so they pause the following vehicle to avoid corrupting its time due to "traffic". Since those pause times don't count, Sandstorm could have had the better overall time.

Meanwhile, there were other problems associated with the 20 other robots running the course. Some of them started very late, because Team Caltech's Alice got off course and ran up onto one of the safety barriers. The race officials towed Alice off the course and repaired the barrier before allowing any other robots to pass. Between the starting stagger and the delay to repair the barrier, some teams started more than two hours after H1ghlander.

It's easy to dismiss these teams, because they didn't rank well in the National Qualification Event, but that can be misleading. All but two robots travelled farther than the best robot from last year. In particular, two robots performed must better than the NQE would have predicted.

The Gray Team's KAT-5 started 16th and made a great run. Based in Louisiana, they have a decidedly low tech sponsor: The Gray Insurance Company. In fact, the robot was originally called "GrayBot" until the category 5 hurricane "Katrina" wiped out most of the team’s homes. So they renamed the robot, and kept on going. And going, and going. In the desert twilight, 12 hours after the first robot started, KAT-5 crossed the finish line. KAT-5 should get a prize for finishing with the lowest budget and the biggest obstacle to overcome.

Most of the other robots have broken down by this point. There was only one other robot still in action when KAT-5 crossed the finish line -- Team TerraMax's TerraMax (#21). Due to darkness, officials halted TerraMax for the night. The robot probably would have been fine in the dark, but they were worries about the safety of the chase team and course crew. So they shut it down for the night, and resumed the next morning.

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