Team Tartan takes DARPA Urban Challenge win

The most logical distinction between those with a generous budget and those with mortgages, race-tape, fencing wire and camaraderie bordering on insanity was the Track A US$1,000,000 funding grant from DARPA. Awarded just over twelve months ago, eleven track A teams each received US$1 million in technology development funds from DARPA and seven of those teams reached the final held yesterday.

Like Grand Prix racing, those teams can be likened to “factory teams” and the “non-factory” or privateer teams that made the final were really in a race of their own. Three of those teams, Team Annie Way, CarOLO and Team UCF fell out of the competition in the first stage of the final, but the Students and Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University should be immensely proud of the efforts of their team. They gave the best brains in existence a million dollar head start and nearly ran them down in the finish.

The analogies with racing are so many that I’m not going to bore you with any more of them in what is supposed to be a short article, bar this last one.

DARPA’s logistical efforts in creating this event have to be seen to be appreciated. Whereas all the contestants and the organizers have equivalents in the world of Formula One (an awesomely-sized enterprise in its own right), none comes close to the need to build a racetrack longer than any in existence elsewhere. The former George Air Force Base in Victorville, is used by the U.S. military to train for urban operations. The network of roads on the site effectively simulated the type of terrain American forces operate in when deployed overseas, but in turning it into an arena safe for spectators to watch robots run at road speeds in safety, it effectively built a one-off venue of a size rarely attempted.

So the big winners of the week were Tartan, Stanford, Team Victor Tango, Ben Franklin Racing and DARPA. Everyone who competed was a winner and we suspect that the continued growth of this remarkable community is assured, with some great stories still to be filed on the things we found among the dust at Victorville.

Stay tuned!

MH