January 26, 2007 3:38 PM PST
Preparing for DARPA's urban road challenge
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The day before, one of the oversized truck's competitors in a race of robotic vehicles sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Stanford University's unmanned Volkswagen SUV, had claimed victory in a 132-mile robotic desert race. So this was about pride.
After idling overnight in the desert partially because its support vehicle broke down and TerraMax couldn't proceed without it, Team OshKosh had blown its chance to win anything. It could no longer meet the time requirements. Still, onlookers were wide-eyed witnessing a massive military-grade robot creep down the twisting gravel roads--with sheer drop-offs on either side--that even human drivers would find harrowing.
It was history in the making.
"I don't know how in the world TerraMax made it down that. They were slow, but they got it done," said Doug Traster, team leader for 2005 entrant Indy Robotics and president of Indianapolis-based Precise Path Robotics.
As one of the biggest trucks in the DARPA Grand Challenge--a test of robotic engineering with a prize of $2 million--Oshkosh Truck's TerraMax garnered much attention. DARPA officials even decided to start it last in the competition, despite it qualifying for an early start, because they were concerned that if the massive truck were to get stuck, it would cause a bottleneck for the other robots.
Since 2004, DARPA's ultimate goal in designing the robotic competition has been to foster the development of autonomous vehicles for the military. TerraMax, born of the advanced products group at military vehicle supplier Oshkosh, was the only Army-grade truck in the race.
"Of course, size moved against us (in the 2005 race), but larger trucks (will) likely be where the military deploys this technology. In logistic scenarios, it's these bigger trucks that do that work," said Chris Yakes, director of advanced products at Oshkosh and team leader of TerraMax since its first race in 2004.
Next up...city streetsIn 2007, TerraMax will be back in action for DARPA's Urban Challenge, the agency's third contest of autonomous vehicles. This time, teams must master the obstacles of city streets. DARPA will again award more than $2 million in prizes to the finalists, and it's already granted $1 million to TerraMax for development in this upcoming challenge.
TerraMax is among the more watched teams because it was one of only five robots to finish 2005's contest, even though it didn't complete the course in time. Others to watch include 2005 winner Stanford, 2005 finalist Carnegie Mellon University and newcomers like MIT. Other standouts like North Carolina State, which will race an unmanned Lotus Elise, are bucking the trend of bigger trucks like OshKosh's.
Still, event watchers say the 2007 race will likely produce a weak showing like DARPA's first Grand Challenge in 2004. That year, only CMU's robotic tank "Sandstorm" made it as far as 7.4 miles before spinning its wheels in the desert. The race was the first of its kind--with a wide-open, conceptual basis--and teams didn't have a practical idea of how to program or design their bots to win, event insiders say. That changed in 2005 when five vehicles finished the course.
Similarly, the 2007 Urban Challenge will raise the bar. Unlike the largely open space of the desert race, 2007 competitors will "drive" astride or head-on with other robots on the streets, possibly including human drivers or DARPA remote-controlled vehicles. The robots must navigate oncoming and cross traffic, light signal changes, and merge with other traffic. They must even master events like stop queuing, in which the robots figure out which vehicles pulled up to a four-way stop first and whose turn it is to proceed.
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