As fans of desert-based robot racing will already be aware, the weekend saw the second running of the Darpa Grand Challenge race for robotic ground vehicles. And it was a stupendous success for well-funded teams able to put huge quantities of processing power into big 4x4 trucks.
The winner, driving off with a $2m prize, was a modified VW Touareg entered by Stanford University but built with just a little help from huge international manufacturer Volkswagen and its California-based Electronics Research Laboratory.
Dubbed “Stanley”, the winning vehicle boasted seven networked 1.6GHz Pentium M motherboards, hooked up to a stereo visual system, 24GHz radar and a state of the art GPS navigation unit. It completed a challenging 130 mile course in less than seven hours, just minutes ahead of two similarly well-heeled challengers.
Sadly underdogs like Ghostrider, a 125cc motorcycle steered by a single AMD chip and fiendish ingenuity, proved all too capable of crashing into things.
The race turned out not to be such a grand challenge after all, as the big prize has been won on only the second running of the race, an outcome that looked like a tall order after the ignominious end to the first attempt in 2004. That first race saw half the field to struggle to cross the start line, with the front-runner getting stuck and spinning its tyres until they caught fire after only 7.4 miles.

10 Oct 2005