Université de Tours
Langues Étrangères Appliquées – Licence 3
Semestre 1 –Décembre 2005
Anglais – Lexicologie – Groupe 6
Driving force -- the robocar that won
How A1 team from Stanford aced rugged desert race
By Tom Abate, Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, November 6, 2005
On Oct. 8, a robotic car run by Stanford researchers rode into history by winning a race of driverless vehicles.
How a robocar nicknamed "Stanley" crossed 132 miles of desert near Las Vegas, beating 22 rivals, is a tale that began in the summer of 2004, when Stanford artificial intelligence specialist Sebastian Thrun, now 38, and postdoctoral scholar Mike Montemerlo, 30, hatched a plan to beat the field, including the odds-on favorite, Carnegie Mellon University.
They got backing from German automotive giant Volkswagen AG, which donated the car and helped prepare it to receive the Stanford-designed electronic brain. At stake was a $2 million prize offered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which sponsored the race to spur research on unmanned military transport vehicles. Stanley will be on display this week when the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems comes to San Francisco's MosconeCenter.
Four other robocars followed Stanley across the finish line, including two entered by Carnegie Mellon. The other vehicles had mechanical or electronic failures along the way. As cheering Stanford students lifted Thrun and Montemerlo into the air, William "Red" Whittaker, leader of the Carnegie Mellon team, stood nearby. The Stanford duo had once been at Carnegie Mellon. That must have been a bittersweet irony, for while this was a race without drivers, it was full of competitive drive.
Primm is a gambling resort just over the Nevada border near Las Vegas. Before dawn on Oct. 8, its parking lots bustled with risk-takers of a different sort -- the dreamers, academics and defense contractors behind the competing robocars.
Their goal was to meet what DARPA called a Grand Challenge -- to cross a rough desert course in less than 10 hours with no human intervention. DARPA is the long-range research arm of the Department of Defense best known for its sponsorship of research in the 1960s that led to the Internet. October's event was DARPA's second robot race. The first, in 2004, ended in media snickering, when the most successful of the 15 robocars went just 7.4 miles.
That car was entered by Carnegie Mellon -- arguably the world's pre-eminent robotics research center -- and the flamboyant, 6-foot, 4-inch tall Red Whittaker, a fierce competitor who, as a teenager, once wrestled a gorilla on a dare. Whittaker entered in October's race not one, but two robotic Hummers -- painted red, of course.
Asked about the competition on the eve of the event, Whittaker exuded confidence. He noted that Thrun and Montemerlo had both done robotics research in Pittsburgh before defecting to Palo Alto. He gestured at the field full of robotic vehicles and said in a booming voice: "My DNA's all over this race."
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