Talk:DARPA Grand Challenge

Criticisms
I'm sorry, I hope I'm not breaking any guidelines, but I was just wondering if shouldn't there be a 'Criticisms' section about the claims that DARPA is a sort of cover for military advancement. I don't know much about the subject (I didn't even know what DARPA was), but i was linked from a page that discussed this kinds of how do you say, cover-ups?. Page is, as of 01-22-08, http://barrapunto.com/articles/08/01/22/1053245.shtml, it's in Spanish. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.255.77.41 (talk) 00:34, 23 January 2008 (UTC)


 * DARPA is not "a sort of cover" for military advancement: that is their explicitly stated purpose. The lead paragraph adequately addresses the purpose of the Urban challenge (whether that was the case in 2008, I do not know). Feyrauth (talk) 17:07, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Course length
How long is the course? Our article contradicts itself: 150 vs. 210 miles. Also, it's not clear to me whether the vechicles use regular roads, dirt roads, or drive cross country. AxelBoldt 16:18, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't know where the 210 mile number keeps coming from. Looking at a map the distance of 150 miles is much more likely (the course this year ran from just outside Barstow, California to just past the Nevada border).  The number 210 would be more accurate if the race started in Los Angeles, but it didn't.  However, the DARPA rules specify that it can be any distance under 300 miles (so, next year's course may be somewhere else entirely).  And the vehicles travel cross-country: no roads.  However, it's never been clear to me what they do when they have to cross roads - although it's a moot point since I don't think any vehicles got far enough to any cross highways.


 * Anyways, let me see what I can do about the article. RadicalBender 17:24, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * For the 2005 race, DARPA has said the course will be at most 175 miles. As for roads, because of environmental restrictions outside of their control (the desert tortoise for example), all or most of the course is over dirt roads.  The course can and most likely will cross active roads.  In last year's competition, one team was paused to allow a truck to cross the road.  The only external control allowed (actually, its required) is a 3-way control, RUN, PAUSE, and STOP.  If the vehicle is paused, the timer stops running for that team until they start running again.  --Escher0 12:08, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure, but I'm fairly certain that the distance was between 125 and 175 miles. Zephyr817 04:28, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Post Race Hype (+ Unholy Alliance of Wired Magazine & Stanford AI Lab)
Should the article mention the hype surrounding the DARPA Grand Challenge, in particular the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge? For example, how much of a challenge was it really? The course was precisely layed out by thousands of waypoints; no sophisticated planning procedure was necessary. Four separate teams managed to finish the course in time, which suggests that the task was not that hard. In fact, several days before the race the German leader of the Stanford team announced that this time with very high probability there would be a winner, in line with the evaluations of other experts. But after Stanford's Volkswagen won due to a technical glitch of CMU's vehicle he tried to fuel the hype by claiming, rather inconsistently: "The impossible has been achieved!" According to a rather biased Wired magazine article he then compared himself to Charles Lindbergh, like a chicken claiming "I'm an eagle." Confetti parade, anybody? :-)

One of the organizers (Tether - also ex-Stanford) even compared the race to the first flight of the Wright brothers. The Wired article, however, later claimed that another German (Dickmanns) played the role of the Wright Brothers of this field in 1986.

Soon after the race the Stanford AI lab home page also claimed: "Dec 29, 2005: Stanford built three of the top ten robots ever! According to a recent evaluation by Wired Magazine, three of Stanford's robots were among the top ten robots ever: Stanley (Number 1), Shakey (Number 5), and the Stanford Cart (Number 10). Wired Magazine polled numerous experts to determine the 50 Best Robots Ever. Check it out!" Unfortunately Wired magazine is known as a megaphone of Stanford with headquarters in San Francisco - few if any unbiased roboticists outside of California would agree with that list. What kind of "experts" did they poll? Maybe cartoonists, since Number 2 is a fictional Japanese comic strip robot. The other cars that finished shortly after Stanley are not even mentioned... Actually I don't think any mere car would rank near the top 5 of a serious robot list, which would be dominated by Japanese robots - real ones, not fictional ones - since Japan dominates research in this field and has 40 percent of the world's robots, including many of the most sophisticated and famous ones.

Anyway, since the hype was a significant part of the event it seems worth mentioning, even if it was totally overblown. User Ravedave is right though: it must be done in a way that does not leave any room for POV. De-Hyping Stan 16:39, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I absolutely agree. Read the technical papers in "Journal of Field Robotics" and you will be underwhelmed: a gazillion waypoints, very primitive speed control. LOTS of hype, little progress. Samfreed 10:56, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

1995 S-Class Robot Car of Dickmanns
I wrote the first draft of an article about Ernst Dickmanns and his fast vision-guided autonomous Mercedes robots of the past 25 years. ERDI 20:34, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Links
I think that this page has too many links! Nate |  Talk Esperanza! 02:21, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Urban Challenge
I found this page by looking for info on the defunct race, the Urban Challenge. I was hoping there would be info on other scavenger hunt races. Should this be referenced? Gglockner 06:32, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

as the DARPA Urban Challenge heats up (site visits in this summer (2007), competition in Nov) perhaps it might be a good idea to give the new competition it's own page Vectra14 06:29, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

The sponsor list needs to be reformatted, as it looks like Stanford is teaming with (all of) "Volkswagen, Oshkosh, Honeywell, Raytheon, Caltech, Autonomous Solutions, Virginia Tech, Cornell, and MIT". The actual announcement naming the teams specifies it as simply "Stanford University", without mentioning VW by name. Similarly, CMU is listed without the GM link. Nchoe123 08:16, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

The article says: "The Urban Challenge requires designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other robots on the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles." Shouldn't it be mentioned that the 2007 Urban Grand Challenge is trying to repeat something the VaMP robot car was already able to do 12 years ago? And the VaMP was even faster, although computers were much slower. It seems the field has become a bit stagnant in the past decade. Willingandable 10:55, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I inserted: It is interesting to compare the 1995 VaMP robot car of  Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns to the five cars that finished the course of  the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: Stanley & Sandstorm & H1ghlander & TerraMax & Kat-5. In 2005, the DARPA cars drove 212 km without human intervention. In 1995, the VaMP drove up to 158 km without human intervention. The DARPA cars drove on a dirt road flattened by a steamroller. The VaMP drove on the Autobahn. In both cases the road boundaries were easily identifiable by computer vision. Like many commercial cars, the DARPA cars used GPS navigation, essentially driving from one waypoint to the next (almost 3000 waypoints for the entire course, several waypoints per curve). Like humans, the VaMP drove by vision only. The DARPA cars reached speeds up to 40 km/h. The VaMP reached speeds up to 180 km/h. So the VaMP was more than four times faster although its computer processors apparently were 1000 times slower. The DARPA cars did not encounter any traffic but a few stationary obstacles. The VaMP drove in traffic around moving obstacles, passing other cars. Willingandable 04:25, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I edited this section (the one mentioned above) on all the pages of the vehicles you mentioned with the same version I edited into this article. Hopefully, this brings about a NPOV. I also made sure that as many comparisons as was possible (information on the VaMP is sparse) were cited. Kivaan 21:36, 25 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the improvements! I inserted that Stanley passed H1ghlander "when H1ghlander was standing still". Willingandable 14:44, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

The long shadow of Ernst Dickmanns
Some claim the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge was a step forward, since the US teams in the earlier 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge failed. Picking the 2004 race as a straw man for a good bashing! But of course the real reference point is what Ernst Dickmanns achieved ten years earlier. In 1995 his car autonomously drove up to 158 km, nearly the same distance as the traffic-free 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, but much faster, and in traffic. Without GPS, using only computer vision, which apparently was much more sophisticated than the vision used in the GPS-based DARPA races. I cannot see any significant technological innovations or progress here. And even the upcoming 2007 Urban Grand Challenge looks rather tame when compared to what Dickmanns did. Truecobb 21:18, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Separate 2005 page (obsolete) discussion
I have untied the 3 articles, about 2004, 20056, and the Grand Challenge in General. Here is the "Talk Page" from 2005. Samfreed 09:20, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Correcting the Times
"The Stanford Racing Team was the first to cross the finish line, with a time of 7 hours and 54 minutes. Red Team Too finished soon after with a time of 7 hours and 59 minutes. The third team to cross the finish line was Read Team, with a surprise upset at a time of 7 hours 52 minutes. It is important to note, however, that due to the staggered start, the order in which they crossed the finish line is not indicative of their place. Note: These results are not official."

Where are these results from? If they're directly from the Grand Challenge.com flash interface, they're incorrect, as the the time hasn't been stopped, and is continuing to run.


 * I was taking the times from the flash interface, and you are right, they are wrong. I'm changing to times to match a news article (http://www.gizmag.com/go/4720/). --mdd4696 21:29, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Local Patriotism
This site and others link to a rather one-sided Wired magazine article on the DARPA race winner Stanley %28vehicle%29, and in the Stanford AI lab home page I found this announcement of another one: "Dec 29, 2005: Stanford built three of the top ten robots ever! According to a recent evaluation by Wired Magazine, three of Stanford's robots were among the top ten robots ever: Stanley (Number 1), Shakey (Number 5), and the Stanford Cart (Number 10). Wired Magazine polled numerous experts to determine the 50 Best Robots Ever. Check it out!"

The problem is, of course, that Wired magazine is based in San Francisco and has strong ties to Stanford. Local patriotism may be fun, but few if any unbiased roboticists would agree with that list.

So what kind of "experts" did they poll? Maybe cartoonists, since Number 2 is a fictional Japanese comic strip robot. The other cars that finished shortly after Stanley are not even mentioned...

Presumably the list is not meant to be taken seriously. Any serious list would be dominated by real Japanese robots (and would not even mention fictional ones), since Japan clearly dominates robotics research and has 40 percent of the world's robots, including many of the most expensive and sophisticated and famous ones. I don't think any mere car would rank among the top 5. But don't expect Wired magazine to publish such a list!

Nevertheless, Wikipedia articles such as this one might want to link to a bit more objective sources. De-Hyping Stan 16:54, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Agree, though bias can be hard to spot. I would agree with the fact that Stanly is a top ten robot (though I think the Mars rovers beat it) - Ravedave 18:05, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, even if we accept the (in my opinion questionable) premise that Stanley should be in the top 10 list, shouldn't the vehicles of, say, CMU appear there, too? One of them led the race and apparently just lost due to a technical glitch, finishing just a few minutes after Stanley. I guess Wired magazine would have included them if CMU was a local Californian university... De-Hyping Stan 21:42, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Shakey wasn't even built at Stanford; Shakey was built at SRI International, a think tank near Stanford. I saw that Wired list; it was weak on Japanese research robots. Still, I was quite impressed with the Stanford grand challenge entry, which represented a significant breakthrough in computer vision.  The CMU effort was basically an attempt to throw money at the problem, and wasn't really that innovative.    --John Nagle 06:25, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


 * CMU had expected a much tougher race than what was presented, and this caused them to overbuild their software compared to Stanford's. As you might expect, this meant their software ran slower, and was one of the factors that led them to defeat (Intel was a contributor to both teams and wrote an article about this). Both cars were very well engineered, and I wouldn't claim that one was much better than the other. 67.186.29.171 23:07, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Chicken and Eagle
How much of a challenge was it anyway? The course was precisely layed out by numerous waypoints. No sophisticated planning procedure was necessary. Four separate teams managed to finish the course in time. This seems to suggest that the task was not that hard.

In fact, several days before the race the Stanley team leader announced that this time with very high probability there would be a winner, thus reflecting the general feelings of all the experts. Afterwards, however, he fueled the hype by claiming, rather inconsistently: "the impossible has been achieved!" Then he compared himself to Charles Lindbergh (no joke!), according to the Wired magazine article, which also says the "Wright Brothers / Kitty Hawk spot" belongs to Ernst Dickmanns (1986). Lindbergh! Like the chicken claiming "I'm an eagle!" One of the most ridiculous comparisons I've seen lately. Now waiting for the confetti parade :-) De-Hyping Stan 19:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Just to clear some things up, first, all 4 teams that completed the race used relatively sophisticated obstacle detecting sensors and path planning software. Although the waypoints were given, the path contained obstacles and cliffs.  Second, the Stanley team leader's announced belief that there would be a winner reflected his insider opinion.  His statement that "the impossible has been achieved" refers to how hard a problem this was to solve, stumping researchers for a decade.  The statements only contradict when taken out of context.


 * What do you mean by "stumping researchers for a decade?" A decade before the DARPA race Ernst Dickmanns already had much more impressive autonomous cars, going much faster, and in traffic. Where exactly was the progress here? Truecobb 20:43, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Dickmanns' achievement was impressive. Note, though, that during 1758 km of (almost) autonomous driving on Dickmanns' Autobahn run, 185 times a human had to intervene and take over. Driving with a human ready to take over is not quite the same as driving without intervention over an entire preset substantial course. -R. S. Shaw 00:30, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Sure, but note that on highways with little traffic it went up to 40 miles autonomously, no GPS guidance, four times faster than the five (!) successful DARPA race cars, which didn't have to face any traffic... and this was 10 years ago when computers were slow. Does not look like a lot of progress to me. Truecobb 20:15, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I have to correct my previous statements - according to the article on Ernst Dickmanns his 1995 car autonomously drove up to 158 km. Nearly the same distance as the 2005 "Grand Challenge", but much faster, and in traffic. Truecobb 20:18, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Mention Foreign Contributions?
The original DARPA web site was headed by the slogan "Harnessing American Ingenuity." But perhaps the Wikipedia article should also mention some of the foreign contributions? For example, the University of Parma (Italy) contributed to one of the cars that finished the course. And the winner was a German car with a German team leader. (Who promptly compared himself to Lindbergh - see section chicken and eagle above.) De-Hyping Stan 19:15, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

1995 S-Class Robot Car of Dickmanns
More than ten years ago a fast vision-guided autonomous Mercedes robot programmed by the team of Ernst Dickmanns (the pioneer of robot cars) already performed pretty amazing feats - the Grand Challenge doesn't look so impressive in comparison. I was surprised that I could not find a decent Wikipedia article about Dickmanns, and wrote a first draft. ERDI 20:53, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

VaMP (1995) vs Stanley & Sandstorm & H1ghlander & TerraMax & Kat-5 (2005)
Five cars finished the course of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: Stanley & Sandstorm & H1ghlander & TerraMax & Kat-5. It is interesting to compare them to the earlier VaMP robot car of Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns. My sources are mostly Wikipedia and the rest of the web. In 2005, the DARPA cars drove 212 km without human intervention. In 1995, the VaMP drove up to 158 km without human intervention. The DARPA cars drove on a dirt road flattened by a steamroller. The VaMP drove on the Autobahn. In both cases the road boundaries were easily identifiable by computer vision. Like many commercial cars, the DARPA cars used GPS navigation, essentially driving from one waypoint to the next (almost 3000 waypoints for the entire course, several waypoints per curve). Like humans, the VaMP drove by vision only. The DARPA cars reached speeds up to 40 km/h. The VaMP reached speeds up to 180 km/h. So the VaMP was more than four times faster although its computer processors apparently were 1000 times slower. The DARPA cars did not encounter any traffic but a few stationary obstacles. The VaMP drove in traffic around moving obstacles, passing other cars. Interestingly, the 2007 Urban Grand Challenge is trying to repeat something the VaMP was already able to do 12 years ago. Willingandable 03:38, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

The VaMP team 12 years ago solved a very different problem than the Grand Challenge 2005 did, and a similar but much easier one than the GC 2007 does. Their achievements are applaudable but the above snippet leaves out a few details:

- VaMP drove exclusively on highways, so no tight curves, intersections, precedence rules, parking etc as in urban traffic

- Much more structured environment, everything is engineered to be observable and all that is required to drive successfully is to stay between two white lines and keep the same distance to the car in front of you.

- GPS is not necessary because the car only goes straight (and slightly left/right if the highway has curves). Highway on/offramps and interesections were handled manually.

- The 158km autonomous-stretch was the best of thousands of driving stretches, not of just one as in the GC. The mean time between human interventions was just 9km. Furthermore, it was in self-selected terrain. Denmark to be exact, where there is a general speed limit of 110km/h and hence everyone goes at the same speed and overtaking is not necessary.

RobotsRock 20:26, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

I edited the latest version to achieve a less repetitive and more structured section: Five cars finished the course of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: Stanley, Sandstorm, H1ghlander, TerraMax, and Kat-5. It is interesting to compare them to the earlier VaMP robot car of Mercedes-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns. The VaMP was built in the 1990's as a continuation of Dickmanns' earlier work at the Universität der Bundeswehr München in Munich; the project was funded in part by the $1 billion dollar EUREKA Prometheus Project. The VaMP was able to drive in traffic among moving obstacles, automatically passing slower vehicles; the DARPA cars were not (H1ghlander was standing still when Stanley passed it in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge). The VaMP reached speeds up to 180 km/h (111 mph); the DARPA cars were limited to top speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph). In 1995, the VaMP drove up to 158 km without human intervention on a Danish highway where most drivers adhere to the 110km/h general speed limit and passing is rarely necessary; decisions made by the VaMP were checked for validity by a human safety pilot (the 158km represent the longest stretch of thousands of km of test runs, and the terrain was self-selected by the VaMP team). In 2005, the DARPA cars drove 212 km (132 miles) without human intervention on the Grand Challenge course selected by the race organizers. VaMP drove on the mostly straight Autobahn ; the DARPA cars drove on a variety of graded dirt roads, including narrow and steep mountain passes. The VaMP drove mostly by vision with some input provided by radar but without GPS navigation;  the DARPA cars heavily used  GPS, always driving from one waypoint to the next (the DARPA course was unrehearsed by the teams but precisely given by almost 3000 waypoints, with several waypoints per curve). The DARPA cars combined other sensor data such as LIDAR, video cameras, and inertial guidance systems for better navigation in between waypoints, where road boundary identification was harder than on the Autobahn because of the unstructured terrain (Autobahn road boundaries are engineered to be easily visually observable). The top speed of the VaMP's computer processors was 1000 times slower per dollar than those used in the DARPA vehicles. Onetofive 15:33, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Carnegie-Mellon cheated?
I was told by someone familiar with the competition that Carnegie Melon cheated because of the pressure on their team. Something about hiring a helicopter to overfly the course, or something. I don't know the details, so I'm just asking if anyone else had heard of these rumours. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.105.104.95 (talk • contribs).

Just watching the NOVA program I have to say CMU certainly cheated by having their army of laptop monkeys feverishly preprogramming the entire route upon receiving the waypoints.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.135.142.144 (talk • contribs) 18:09, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * That wasn't cheating; it was well within the rules, which explicitly allowed 2 hours for such planning to take place. A dozen humans planning is not exactly an army, either, but does show resources being available to throw at the problem. Of course such an approach is hardly elegant; Stanford's system has clean lines in comparison. -R. S. Shaw 21:52, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

My two cents
Having driven around both on German Autobahns and on (few) sand tracks -though I do not know what the tracks for the 2005 challenge were like - I can say that at least for me as a human, Autobahns provide much less of a challenge concentration-wise. In fact, falling asleep at the wheel generally seems to be big enough a problem that it is reflected in certain design features, like avoidance of straight sections and "humming" road markings. I would also imagine that the road/lane limits (on the Autobahn it's staying on your lane that matters) are much clearer on the Autobahn, but this would have to be verified, for exapmle by driving in the moonshine with lights off. Generally I would think that a German Autobahn offers few obstacles that are smaller than a motorbike but big enough to damage/overturn your car. Last not least, trying to drive at speeds of 180 km/h on a desert track just doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Yaan 18:28, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Update info on Urban Challenge
The info in this article is quite outdated. There will only be 11 cars racing. http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34665/113/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.201.23.127 (talk) 20:45, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't call it "quite outdated" for a story that is only a few hours old. It does appear that you are correct, though, and that only 11 teams will be competing. http://www.gizmag.com/go/8277/gallery/ http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ Cardsplayer4life 21:27, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I went ahead and added the info to the article. Cardsplayer4life 21:38, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Individual Article Creation for different events? (2004, 2005, 2007, etc.)
Should there be individual articles for each event? This one is getting lengthy, and as the results from the 2007 event roll in over the next few days, I expect it will only grow more. A brief summary on this article, with links to the individual articles for each event might make sense at this juncture. Anyone else have any thoughts? Cardsplayer4life 01:51, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Nothing wrong with a long article, though some editing may be in order (details of history can be dropped). In any case, anyone interested in one year would be interested in the others. We used to have 3 articles, main, 2004, and 2005, but then they were merged, rightly IMHO. Samfreed 09:18, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, it looks like someone went ahead and created separate articles and linked to them like I was suggesting. Cardsplayer4life 00:58, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Next DARPA Grand Challenge ?
I fail to find any official (or even unofficial) statement about wether or not there will be other DARPA Grand challenges. While it seems that all technical milestones were achieved, the competition could now be about average speed and endurance. Does anyone have informations on this ? --Iv (talk) 17:14, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
 * There are many possible more or less obvious next challenges such as passive sensor only driving but it is possible that the light shined on the fact that it's a competition to further warfare by me and perhaps others has dampened their spirit somewhat. They used to have an image of a camo humvee in a desert city area on their site but removed it after I firmly pointed out what the real purpose of the competition was on their forum. Not only are they depraved enough to develop weapons to kill but curiously enough didn't like to be reminded of the purpose of their work. My comments were deleted because the truth is not welcome when you are doing evil. I suspect that's at least partially the cause but perhaps also coupled with an error in judgment that it's good enough as is and can't be much better. As long as there are republicans and soldiers in this world it's probably best that we don't have AI killing machines. (not that anything in the competition was worthy of the term AI, fortunately) -Dan Frederiksen 85.83.19.103 (talk) 09:52, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
 * I honestly doubt that anyone participating on the DARPA challenge had any doubt about why the DARPA was funding this competition. --Iv (talk) 14:30, 14 October 2009 (UTC)

Removed garbled sentence
Hi there, I removed this sentence: Although the 2004 course required more elevation gain and some very sharp switchbacks (Daggett Ridge) were required near the beginning of the route, the course had far fewer curves and generally wider roads than the 2004 course.

This is obviously meaningless. If you work on this page, and know what it is supposed to say, it would be great if it could be corrected and re-inserted, as I think it could be a useful comparison. C.anguschandler (talk) 18:08, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedians should solve DARPA "balloon hunt" and donate proceeds to Wikipedia
I've been thinking about the new DARPA challenge (http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/) and it seems to me Wikipedia/Wikipedians are uniquely positioned to solve this challenge. I am not a big wikipedia contributor, but would certainly be happy to share any knowledge I get about the balloons to support Wikipedia. Anyone else interested? Has this already been proposed? Let me know if there is a more appropriate page to make this suggestion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Velosa (talk • contribs) 02:07, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Comparisons to VaMP section
I am being bold and deleting the "Comparisons to VaMP" section: the article is on the DARPA Grand Challenge, not VaMP. The "History and Background" section mentions VaMP (amongst other similar projects) and provides a link; readers can draw their own comparison. Not to mention that it's very hard to read in its current form. Feyrauth (talk) 17:23, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

DARPA Robotics Challenge
The inclusion of information about the third challenge in the opening paragraph seems odd for a general DARPA GC article without also mentioning the upcoming Robotics Challenge, which seems to be part of a logical progression. I have made some edits to tweak the reference to the third challenge (less detail, which is repeated in the subsection on the Urban Challenge) and to add the Robotics Challenge which Disco1stu added to the article last month.LUxlii (talk) 19:57, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Technology, Section 6, the one with the List of OS and Language(s) used for the 2007 Urban Challenge...
... has no mention of what Stanford Racing (& Volkswagon) used for a computer language or OS. I thought it would be of interest since they came in 2nd.129.170.31.110 (talk) 14:57, 2 July 2013 (UTC)Brett Tofel

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Suggest to remove first image because of inaccuracy
The image at the top of this article, titled "DesertToCity.jpg" claims to be in the Mojave Desert at the site of the Grand Challenge, facing Downtown Los Angeles. Although it is a cool image, I don't think it is accurate, and I think it should be removed from this page. I'm wondering if it is photoshopped.

Reason 1: Looking at the orientation of the Downtown LA buildings in the background anyone can immediately notice with some simple research it is showing a view of Downtown from the northwest. Mojave desert is to the northeast of Downtown LA, not the northwest, which would mean a much different order of the high rise buildings (U.S. Bank building, PWC building, etc.). If you are curious, glance at images from Griffith Observatory which show DTLA. Unless there was some leg of the DARPA Challenge that happened in the Hollywood hills where this picture was taken that I don't know about, this should be enough convincing reason alone.

Reason 2: Mojave Desert is at an elevation of 4,000 feet MSL (mean sea level), Downtown LA is at about 300 feet elevation MSL, and in between the two is a large mountain range which includes Mt Baldy, which is about 10,000 ft. Given I don't know the exact coordinates of the desert location where the picture was taken, it could have been anywhere somewhat along the I-15 highway route from Barstow to the California-Nevada border in Primm, and we can't assume the straight line distance intersects Mt Baldy perfectly. But a straight line distance to DTLA would likely cross the mountain range at about a elevation of 8,000 ft at the highest point. Therefore, I don't see how you could position a camera to get DTLA to line up perfectly behind the car like this picture shows, without the mountain range several thousand feet higher blocking it. The only possibility I can think of would be if the picture was taken in the Mountain Pass area further to the northeast nearby Primm, but seems very unlikely.

Reason 3: Reason 3 is air quality visual distance. The competition's route ranges from about 90 miles away from DLTA (at Barstow) to about 190 miles away from DTLA (at Primm, NV) as the bird flies. Air quality in southern CA does not usually warrant long-distance visibility this clear so this also makes this seem unlikely.

Reason 4: Kind of tags on to reason 2, but notice how there is very conveniently a dust cloud on the horizon right in the transition area between the desert scape and the crystal clear city buildings. I am guessing this was added in photoshop to ward off any scrutiny into how these 2 different sceneries connected.

2022 Triage Challenge
I added this challenge for medical triage a few months ago, only to realize now the theme of this page is about the Grand Challenge, although this article does include other robotic vehicle challenges not part of the Grand Challenge. If there is no objection, I will remove the Triage Challenge from this article and find an appropriate article to repost it (or do a separate article). Thank you. Path2space (talk) 20:55, 17 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I just removed the section on the Triage Challenge and have added it to the article DARPA Prize Competitions. Thank you. Path2space (talk) 03:33, 20 December 2023 (UTC)