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Oh, the places you'll go!

Working for Diesel Progress has taken me to some weird, fun, remote and interesting locales. But it was only standing in the Mojave Desert before dawn in the parking lot of a tacky casino in the ironically named Primm, Nevada, that all of those adjectives came together.

The occasion was the DARPA Grand Challenge, a Pentagon-sponsored event to see if 23 robotic vehicles--no drivers--could find their way across 131.6 miles of desert terrain and back to Buffalo Bill's Resort and Casino without any human help. No video-game-fanatics sitting in a van with joysticks, no telemetry, none of that stuff.

The challenge was simple: start the computers, load the waypoints, start the engines and see what happens. All over a route revealed only a couple of hours before the start.

It was a "race" through terrain that included narrow desert roads, runnels, dry lake beds, as well as a fight gap in the mountains called Beer Bottle Pass. All the robotic vehicles had to do in Beer Bottle Pass was snake down a series of switchbacks, portions of which featured a sheer rock wall on one side and a 200 ft. drop on the other. Clear Beer Bottle Pass and the finish line was in sight. And at the finish line a $2 million, winner-take-all check awaited the vehicle that made it through all that the fastest.

Easy? The only other time this was tried, in 2004, no vehicle made it further than 7.5 miles. The entire practicality of operating autonomous ground vehicle operation--that's cars, trucks and other types of three- and four-wheeled vehicles sans humans--was on test here.

The whole event had an air of urgency about it, not typically seen at technology demonstrations. The first military use of this type of technology is expected to supply convoys, where about 25% of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan are being incurred. This was more than boys (and girls) playing with cars.

While initial impressions of the DARPA Grand Challenge were provided in the Crank Angles section of Diesel Progress' new website and full results will be detailed in the December issue of Diesel Progress, we can report now that a number of vehicles made it through the entire 131.6 miles and that Beer Bottle Pass did not claim any victims.

Maybe the weirdest part of the event--and there were many to chose from --were two sentences I have never seen on an event agenda (and hope not to see again): "4 a.m.--Press Registration Opens;" and "5 a.m.--Press Briefing."

They start early and run late in the desert, for the ultimate good cause.

Mike Osenga

mosenga@dieselpub.com

COPYRIGHT 2005 Diesel & Gas Turbine Publications
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