Car: Where's my dude?*
The contest wasn't just an aimless road trip.
No, it was a guided race. We were given several thousand GPS points as breadcrumbs that the robots had to follow around the course. One never had to teach the vehicle to make decisions about which path to take—only how to follow the path and how to avoid obstacles at high speeds. In the 2004 challenge, the best-performing team didn't have a robot that perceived its environment; it just went full speed after the breadcrumbs. The problem was that the GPS is not that good. There is about a 2-meter resolution for GPS, and if you are 2 meters off the road, you fall off a cliff. In 2004, the Carnegie Mellon team went off the road and burned up a tire, which then caught on fire.
Could the race have been won with technology that existed in 2004?
My claim is, yes. It could have been done. We just needed more time to examine and understand the problem. It is a tedious argument and we have the benefit of hindsight, but The lesson is that robotics has reached a level where it can really do magic.
The movie makes the challenge look rather easy.
Driving is easy. People age 80 and age 16 do it all the time. You can be drunk and do it. How many brain cells does it take to drive a car?
What kinds of brain cells were inside your vehicle?
Inside, we had the equivalent of a high-end desktop computer. If we were to commercially package what we designed, it could be run off one laptop quite easily. It's not the number-crunching power or the speed—it's the algorithms.
What's the next challenge for the robotic community?
To change the world.
Starting small, eh?
You might be able to tell that I am a bit of an optimist. But here's an example. In 2007, we want to have a car that drives itself from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles, 100 percent autonomously. There will be a person inside, of course, but that person will not touch anything for six hours as the car drives. The limitation of the grand challenge is that it is essentially done in a vacuum with nothing interfering with the progress. In our next attempt, there will be moving traffic, which poses a considerable challenge.
*Headline recycled from a 2003 U.S. News story on the Cadillac XLR.
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