Team Tartan takes DARPA Urban Challenge win

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November 4, 2007 The man-most-likely finally got to stand atop the victory dias in the DARPA Urban Challenge today when Tartan Racing’s Chevy Tahoe Boss gave Red Whittaker the victory everyone thought would be his in the 2005 Grand Challenge. Tartan Racing won the US$2 million prize for first, while Stanford Racing’s VW Junior won the $1 million second place prize, reversing the order from the last DARPA event. Third was Team Victor Tango’s Odin. The event was a massive triumph for the educational system of Pennsylvania which provided the dominant winner of the event (from Carnegie Mellon) and the most ingenious and successful of the underfunded “Track B” teams which came from University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University (Ben Franklin Racing Team).

Tartan Racing's win was no surprise - the team's Chevy Taho named BOSS looked formidable from the first day that all the vehicles got on the track together, running cleaner than all the other robots and “much more aggressively” as other team leaders were want to describe it.

Tartan looked the winner in every respect. It;'s an old racing adage that to finish first, you must first finish and Boss's speed came not from brute force, but from confidence in its vision and processing powers. As with most form's of racing, anyone can go fast for a lap or two, but to maintain that speed until the end of the race requires the skills to cope with problems at speed and to make continuously infallible decisions about what to do to correct them. Boss's speed came from confidence that its systems would enable it to make good decisions and NOT crash or break the rules.

But speed and cleanliness of its manouvres and decision-making were not the only aspects which made Team Tartan look unbeatable all week.

Its corporate sponsors all turned up in force for the press conference and put on one of the most impressive showings of the entire week (behind Boss's display in the final and the monumental logistical nightmare overcome by DARPA in staging the event) at the team press conference on Friday.

Just how do you assemble a team of sponsors which includes General Motors AND Caterpillar AND Continental AND Target AND Google AND a bunch of other household names. Putting together the dream team of sponsors deserves recognition in itself and it seemed to fit with the general perception that the overall package was complete from every angle.

Friday's press conference was opened by Whittaker but once it was underway, he left the floor to a stellar cast which included GM’s Larry Burns (VP of R&D and Strategic Planning), Caterpillar’s Tana Utley (VP and CTO) and Continental Automotive System’s President Karl-Thomas Neumann. Burns had GM’s CTO in tow and together with Team Tartan’s CTO Dr Chris Urmson, the four stood eye-to-eye with the world’s most enthusiastic technology media amid the dust and made no bones about the fact they had come to learn but also they had come to win, and that they’d sought out the best in order to do so.

Burns said GM was already beginning to incorporate camera-based and radar-based sensors in its 2007 cars and one of the key focuses of the week for the corporation was to examine the technologies and what they might offer the consumer of the future. He mentioned the company was already working on a “Virtual Valet” function which would see the company’s cars given the technology to park themselves in the not-too-distant future and he mentioned the inevitability that computers would be increasingly incorporated into road cars within the next few years for accident mitigation purposes and would eventually produce “a car that doesn’t crash.”

Utley said that semi-autonomous functionality had been at market for some time already in the Caterpillar B10 and B11 machinery, but that because of the high cost and value proposition of machinery which commonly cost more than a million dollar apiece, the technology was migrating downwards faster in her industry and had already reached the D6 dozer line.

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