Robots Set to Race for $1 Million Prize

March 10 -- Red Whittaker would invite you to sit behind the wheel of his Humvee — except that it has no steering wheel, and no driver's seat.

Whittaker and his engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University have instead given it radar, LIDAR (laser ranging), GPS, stereo imaging, and a rack of onboard computers. The Humvee, nicknamed "Sandstorm," is completely robotic. If all its equipment works together properly, Whittaker's team could win $1 million — which would cover about a third of the cost of development.

This is what it takes to be a contestant in the "DARPA Grand Challenge," a race across the Mojave Desert this weekend. Its sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the arm of the Pentagon that looks for leading-edge technology.

The object of the challenge is to send a robotic vehicle about 200 miles from Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas, in 10 hours or less, without any human assistance. Two dozen teams are trying, though not all will survive the qualifying runs this week.

While any toddler can navigate across a back yard, it is a much more complicated job for a robot. Whittaker says it has to "calculate its way" across the terrain.

"To succeed, a machine has to think about where it is, where it's going, how to get there, how to stay out of trouble," he said. "It has to be an aggressive form of driving if it's going to win."

Wars of the Future

To an onlooker, the Grand Challenge may look like some student engineering project, but for DARPA, the race is a much more serious matter. Congress has mandated that by 2015, a third of all military vehicles should be robotic, i.e. able to navigate without a person at the wheel.