One Bot Team's DARPA Grand Challenge

Team CyberRider's autonomous vehicle

Last March, THG did a two part series (Part 1 , Part 2 ) on the DARPA 2004 Grand Challenge, a race where autonomous vehicles tried to complete a long desert route. While none of the entrants completed the race, the teams will hopefully apply the hard lessons they learned to the 2005 Grand Challenge next October.

The Grand Challenge is a U.S.-funded competition that challenges teams to construct a vehicle that will drive itself across the desert, autonomously avoiding obstacles. The course is around 175 miles long and the vehicle must finish within 10 hours. The winning team will receive a cool $2 million, which, for some of the teams, will barely pay for their vehicles' navigation gear.

In the spirit of friendly competition, the teams have wildly different ideas on how to get a robotic vehicle across the Mojave desert. In what will be a series of articles, we will interview several Grand Challenge teams in southern California. We will see teams anguish over technical difficulties and rejoice at overcoming obstacles.

For this article, I trekked over to Irvine, California to interview Team CyberRider . These guys and gals are geeks to the core, as they seek to tap their hardware and software wizardry to take out the competition. The team entered a vehicle in the 2004 race, but had to pull out due to a last minute electrical failure. For the 2005 race, they are out for blood.