Talk:Sandstorm (vehicle)

VaMP (1995) vs Sandstorm & H1ghlander & TerraMax & Kat-5 & Stanley (2005)
Five cars finished the course of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: Sandstorm & H1ghlander & TerraMax & Kat-5 & Stanley. 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 there were 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 17:37, 24 August 2007 (UTC)