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Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

Dude, Where’s My Bot?

Since the DARPA Grand Challenge was first billed as a race “from Los Angeles to Las Vegas,” I’m considering it a local event. This is very generous on my part, seeing as how I had to get up at “0-dark-hundred” last Saturday and drive all the way to Barstow to check the thing out.

Actually, the rendezvous point was something called the Slash-X, which sounds more like an edgy Web site than the biker bar it is. The expanse of desert behind it had been transformed into a mighty staging area full of trailers, motorhomes, guys in fatigues and/or reflective vests, and nerds. Thousands of nerds, identifiable by the glowing notebook computers stuck to their forearms like bionic appendages. They were all hovering around their “bots” in the predawn darkness when I arrived, attempting to communicate to them the GPS waypoints of the route they were about to embark on.

No robot race is ordinary, but this one was special indeed. Never before had a challenge so grand been dangled in front of ‘droid masters. The bots were supposed to navigate a 142-mile course (from Barstow to Primm, Nevada) without any human involvement once they exited the starting chute. It may happen in movies every day, but in real life—never before. And before you can say, “Mars Rover,” allow me to explain. Unlike the robots in Barstow, the Mars Rover gets commands from a sentient being.

Oddly enough, the motivating force behind the race was the U.S. Congress. A couple years back, our elected representatives informed the military that one third of combat vehicles have to be autonomous by the year 2015. The agency saddled with accomplishing this daunting feat is DARPA, the R & D arm of the Department of Defense. After companies that already have defense contracts shrank from tackling the task, DARPA decided to use the technique favored by fairy tale kings who want the best suitors for their daughters: hold a contest and let everybody in the kingdom compete. Thus was the DARPA Grand Challenge born. In lieu of a beautiful princess, the prize was a million bucks.

It worked. The contest attracted nerds from across the continent, some from universities, some from corporations, some from backyards. After considerable attrition, the robots that assembled in Barstow last weekend numbered fifteen. They were made out of golf carts, ATVs, dune buggies, and even a motorcycle. One was built from scratch. Favored to win was “Sandstorm,” a red Humvee from Carnegie Mellon University whose pricetag was reputed to be more than three million dollars. Another respected contender was Team Caltech’s “Bob,” and a 32,000-pound chartreuse Oshkosh truck looked like nothing could stop it. “Doom Buggy” was a sentimental favorite because it was built by high school students.

And then there was “Golem I.” “Golem I” was a nondescript 1994 black Ford F-150 pickup truck. While other entries waited for the race to start in well-appointed enclaves with fancy trailers and motorhomes, “Golem I” sat by itself.

“How did you get it here?” I asked team leader Richard Mason.

“Drove it,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s street legal.”

“Golem I” was almost disqualified the day before the race, and a big dent in the front bumper helped explain why.

“We smacked into a wall,” Mason said, again quite matter-of-factly.

Then I found out that Mason, who recently received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Caltech, funded “Golem I” with his winnings from a stint on “Jeopardy.” A full $35,000 had gone into outfitting the bot, almost exactly 1% of the amount spent on “Sandstorm.” I didn’t need to hear any more. Always a sucker for the underdog, I had found my team.

The sun came up, the robot fans packed the grandstand, and the race began. One at a time, the bots pulled out of starting chutes created by concrete barriers, each closely followed by a chase truck provided by DARPA.

“Sandstorm,” having performed the best in preliminary trials, went first. As though it had a human pilot, it successfully navigated turns and headed out into the desert. “Avidor-2004,” a bot fashioned out of an Israeli dune buggy, took off second, followed by Caltech’s “Bob.” Fourth was “DAD,” a sharp-looking Toyota Tundra pickup from a company called Digital Auto Drive.

Things took a turn for the unpredictable after that. The entry from Virginia Tech suffered early burnout when its brakes locked up in the starting area. “The Spirit of Kosrae” became disoriented as soon as it left the chute, wandering around the starting area until DARPA officials finally hit its “kill” switch. “CajunBot,” an entry from the University of Louisiana, crashed into a rock and a creosote bush. And so it went, although “TerraMax,” the big chartreuse truck, performed flawlessly through the starting area and continued smoothly for a mile or so out into the desert. But then it sensed some tall bushes, decided they were threatening, and couldn’t proceed. “Navigator,” a croc-shaped rig built by a team from Florida and Utah, also did well until it ran into some barbed wire.

“Golem I,” since it hadn’t fared very well in the preliminary trials, was the last robot out of the chute. Its windshield completely obscured by a reflective sunscreen, the black truck looked a little menacing as it leapt forward with surprising pep. The crowd roared as it made a perfect left turn, and I realized I wasn’t the only one rooting for the low-budget bot with the dented bumper.

The race was over far sooner than expected. The Mojave Desert proved to be a great equalizer, and the farthest any bot got was 7.4 miles. DARPA kept its oversized check, and most press reports summed up the race as a failure.

In the case of “Sandstorm,” I think the assessment was correct. The Carnegie Mellon Red Team seemed devastated even though their robot finished in first place. But for most of the other teams, I detected no such disappointment. The prevailing attitude seemed to be, “This was a very tall order. It’s amazing the bots got as far as they did.”

Arguably the most amazed of all were the masters of “Golem I.” The black pickup never broke down or misinterpreted its surroundings. But at mile 5.2, while going up a steep hill, “Golem” slowed to a stop. It was still in gear and its engine was still running, but it just didn’t have enough oomph to pull the grade. DARPA officials let the bot keep trying for nearly an hour, but when it was obvious that “the little bot that could” actually couldn’t, they finally shut it down.

For Richard Mason and his team, a fourth place finish was a spectacular victory, and the bot’s surprise performance gave a boost to underfunded geniuses everywhere. Heck, it gave me a boost, and I know nothing about “autonomous ground vehicles.” I can’t tell you whether DARPA learned what it needed to know about building newfangled war machines, and it’s anybody’s guess whether they’ll hold the race again next year in hopes of crowning a real winner. What I can say, though, is that I saw a frog turn into a prince out there in the desert, and that’s a pretty good miracle in its own right.

For more about the DARPA Grand Challenge, click here.

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