An eclectic mix of scientists, a woodworker and a former
off-road racer learned an important lesson this weekend: Slow and
steady may win the race, but it does not necessarily make for the
coolest finish.
With waves of heat emanating off the Mojave Desert floor, the
ragtag group came together Saturday to race their autonomous 2005
Dodge Ram 2500 truck in the hopes of winning a $2 million cash
prize.
With team members from UCLA’s Computer Vision Lab present,
The Golem Group was among about 20 others who raced their vehicles
on a 131-mile course underneath the desert skies in the Defense
Advanced Projects Agency Grand Challenge put on by the Department
of Defense.
Unfortunately for the team, The Golem Group’s truck only
made it an hour into the race having traversed a little over 30
miles. But the finish, while frustrating, was also spectacular
against the mountainous background in Primm, Nev.
After running out of computer memory, the team’s truck
shut down its software and continued on a course dictated by the
program’s last command: acceleration at a two-degree
turn.
The next thing the team knew, Golem 2 was flying through the
air, spiraling and wowing the professional off-road racer and
judges furiously trying to follow it.
“The off-road racer said it was the coolest thing he had
ever seen in his life … and eventually the vehicle came to stop
and the battery broke,” said Eagle Jones, a graduate student
in the Computer Vision Lab at UCLA.
Only five teams finished the race Saturday, with a team from
Stanford nabbing the first-place spot with a time just under seven
hours, according to the DARPA Grand Challenge Web site.
And while The Golem Group was still far from finishing, the
group’s performance left a definite impression on DARPA
officials.
At the first 30-mile marker, the team from UCLA was leading the
pack at a rapid pace, and officials said they thought they had a
winner on their hands, Jones said.
The malfunction, which Jones and his team members had taken
specific steps to prevent before the race, speaks to the wide
variety of challenges the autonomous vehicles face.
Unlike other races, the DARPA Challenge requires each vehicle to
chart a grueling course driverless, on its own steam and navigated
via a pre-programmed route released only hours before the race.
Utilizing technological and strategic tools such as global
positioning systems, various sensors, lasers, fiber optics systems
and cameras, the 20 or so teams which gathered in Nevada over the
weekend were poised for a race in which they hoped at least one
team would win.
Last year’s DARPA Challenge, the first ever, concluded
with no winner. The Golem Group got the fourth place spot at that
race with a mere 5.2 miles traversed.
For the past two years members of the team have spent hours
working on their two trucks, Golem 1 and 2, in addition to their
own research jobs.
The project began when current RAND employee Richard Mason used
his winnings ““ all $30,000 ““ from a stint on TV’s
“Jeopardy” to finance the group.
Together with Jim Radford, who received his Ph.D. in mechanical
engineering in 2003 from the California Institute of Technology and
worked in their Robotics Lab, Mason began collaborating with
scientists at UCLA this year to expand and perfect the trucks.
With their own unique philosophy, the scientists decided to name
themselves after the Hebrew word for “unfinished,” and
with connotations of a thing that is soulless and robotic.
“One of the major things that drove us is that we wanted
to build something that could be driven by humans as well … there
was no reason to reinvent the car,” Jones said.
Unlike some of the Hummers and dune buggies at the race that
were specially outfitted and customized, The Golem Group did little
to their Dodge pickup truck’s design.
Mason focused the team’s efforts on the particulars of the
truck’s automation, and gathered a team with a wide variety
of specialties ranging from fiber optics to software
engineering.
“The race is a strategy game. It takes knowledge, a lot of
preparation, timing and luck. In this case, it’s a team
effort,” Mason said in a UCLA press release.
Wondering why a group of scientists ““ including doctoral
students who have put off writing their dissertations ““ would
spend so much time and effort building autonomous vehicles, The
Golem Group has only one response that it posts on its Web
site:
“No one on his deathbed has ever looked back and said,
“˜I wish I’d spent more time with my family, and less
time building supercool high-tech robots to hurtle across the
desert in a winner-takes-all race for million-dollar
stakes.'”