October 21, 2005


DARPA, the folks who brought you the internet and the neutron bomb, commissioned a race of unpiloted vehicles across an obstacle course. Unpiloted doesn't mean remotely controlled, it means autonomous; no human intervention once it starts. This has been fun to follow for a couple of years, in a Battlebots on Comedy Central kind of way: last year no one got further than 10 miles into the course, but this year Stanford and a couple of other teams finished. But now they've got actual white papers describing the construction of each of this year's entries. If you have nothing better to do this weekend than read about real life Knight Rider cars—you that don't know who you are—your weekend plans are hereby made. The DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 Link Purge. Have fun.
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