When Sandstorm turned the first corner and began to disappear into the open desert, its laser scanner detected a clear path ahead, and the detailed map data said it was time to hit the throttle. Sandstorm’s wheels turn, kick up dust and carry it away at more than 30 km / h.
For Chris Urmson and his teammates, the moment resonated. It was the first time they had let their robot out of sight and out of their control. They could do nothing more. No more testing, no more fixing. Sandstorm would complete the course, or not. And his first big test was just a few miles ahead. The trick to getting up and over Daggett Ridge was to master the backlinks. Hairpin turns so tight that a vehicle can easily follow off the road and hundreds of feet if you just follow a GPS path. It could also be a faulty sensor or some software. If you could clear the obstacle, however, it was back to flat ground and mostly clear roads. It was almost smooth sailing up to Primm.
During the next 20 minutes, three more vehicles left the gate and followed Sandstorm’s trail. It looked like Tether would get a proper race, even after a very shaky performance in the qualifying round. Then the problems began.
Sixth off the line was Axion Racing, a group of friends from San Diego, funded by an investor in a company that imports bottled water from Micronesia. Melanie Dumas, an engineer who once considered the Grand Challenge impossible and not worth writing off, has seen her skepticism and hesitation turn into surging optimism over the past year.
She has seen the Jeep of her team drive in this kind of terrain and drive well. She even thought that with a little luck it might surpass Carnegie Mellon’s Sandeg Storm. When the flag waved, the Jeep pulled out of the gutter and smoothed the first turn. But when it approached the first narrow gate, it turned again. All the way. There was no clear reason for the face. Perhaps the sensors considered the opening too tight. Maybe did something else. It did not matter. When the Jeep drives back to the starting line and steers its racing vehicle backwards like a linebacker, Darpa hits his emergency exit. Axion’s Grand Challenge was over within seconds. Dumas was crushed.
The next step was the six-wheeled Cajunbot of the University of Louisiana. It hit a wall on its way out of the gutter and knocked itself out of the dispute. This was followed by Ensco’s bath of a bot. While the flag was waving, it stood frozen for a few seconds, rolled forward, stopped and started again. It drifted to the left, where the edge of the road ran upward and tilted to one side before moving back to flat ground. Then it goes left again, this time too far. It overturned and landed on its side, 1000 feet in a 142-mile course. The whole run lasted 1 minute and 6 seconds.
A group of students from Palos Verdes High School spent the night before the race getting the steering controls ready for their vehicle. At the last minute, they decided on a solution they had hoped for, with no time to test it. Their prayer remained unanswered. Their entry, Doom Buggy, did not spin at all. It rolled out in a straight line and hit a concrete barrier after 50 meters.
SciAutonics I, led by an engineer who worked on the autonomous management of Germany in the 1980s, saw the ATV stray off the rails and never return. (The SciAutononics II covered it about seven miles before crashing into an embankment.) The University of Florida’s Cimar strayed half a mile and became entangled in a wire fence. Terramax, the 14-ton, lime-green six-wheeled military truck, traveled 1.2 miles before getting stuck between a few small bushes that its sensors considered immobile obstacles. Tired of watching it back and forth hiding like a driver trying to escape an impossibly tight parallel parking lot, Tony Tether orders the murder.