Driverless vehicles rumble in $2 million race through Mojave Desert

PRIMM, Nev. -- A customized Volkswagen SUV created by Stanford University on Saturday became the first driverless vehicle to cross the finish line of a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored robot race across the rugged Mojave Desert.

The race announcer did not immediately declare a winner because 22 out of the 23 robots left the starting line at staggered times at dawn, racing against the clock rather than each other. As the Volkswagen robot dubbed "Stanley" crossed the finish line, a group of Stanford engineers and scientists erupted into cheers.

Four other robots remained on the course.

Last year's much-hyped inaugural robot race ended without a winner when all the self-navigating vehicles broke down shortly after leaving the starting gate. Sandstorm, a customized Humvee by Carnegie Mellon University, chugged the farthest at 7 1/2 miles.

Of the 23 robots that competed Saturday, 15 vehicles failed to navigate the entire 132-mile course, but most still managed to beat Sandstorm's mileage last year.

The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, plans to award $2 million to the first vehicle to cover the race in less than 10 hours. The taxpayer-funded race was intended to spur innovation and development of remote control-free robots that could be used in the battlefield.

Stanley finished the course in less than 7 1/2 hours.

The unmanned vehicles must use their computer brains and sensing devices to follow a programmed route and avoid hitting obstacles that may doom their chances.

Vehicles have to drive on rough, winding desert roads and dry lake beds filled with overhanging brush and man-made obstacles. The machines also must traverse a narrow 1.3-mile mountain pass with a steep drop-off and go through three tunnels designed to knock out their GPS signals.

This year's field was more competitive. Even before Saturday's race, many teams tested their vehicles in parts of the Southwest desert under race-like conditions including some that practiced on last year's course from Barstow, Calif., to Primm.

The vehicles were tricked out with the latest sensors, lasers, cameras and radar that feed information to several onboard computers. This helps vehicles make intelligent decisions such as distinguishing a dangerous boulder from a tumbleweed and calculating whether a chasm is too deep to cross.

Cornell University's military light strike vehicle traveled about 20 miles when it failed to cross a bridge. Team members were trying to figure out what went wrong.

"We're at a loss," said Ephrahim Garcia, a Cornell mechanical engineer. "It's a disappointment."

The so-called Grand Challenge race is part of the Pentagon's effort to cut the risk of casualties by fulfilling a congressional mandate to have a third of all military ground vehicles unmanned by 2015.

The military currently has a small fleet of autonomous ground vehicles stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the machines are remotely controlled by a soldier who usually rides in the same convoy. The Pentagon wants to eliminate the human factor and use self-thinking robotic vehicles to ferry supplies in war zones.