Talk:Stanley (vehicle)

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 17:42, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

I edited the VaMP section to add citations and to hopefully make the view point neutral. I'm going to chase down the section in the other vehicles' pages, to make them all match. I would say there is significant difference between the VaMP and the 2007 Urban Grand Challenge. Namely, the VaMP attempted to drive like a human, and cost. DARPA vehicles appear to be somewhat less expensive to make, and rely on combinations of huge amounts of raw data to drive like, well, a robot with a somewhat military goal (since that is what the overall goal of the technology sponsored by DARPA is). Kivaan 20:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Too much copied from other sources?
Anyone else notice that the wording for some of the equipment-related parts comes from http://cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/technology.html? Raazer 13:32, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Hype
This site links to a rather biased WIRED article, and in the Stanford AI lab home page I just 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 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...

Probably 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 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 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 17:11, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Chicken and Eagle
How much of a challenge was the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge? 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 confirming the general feelings of other experts. Afterwards, however, he fueled the hype by claiming, rather inconsistently: "The impossible has been achieved!" According to the questionable Wired magazine article he then compared himself to Charles Lindbergh, the first guy to fly across the Atlantic non-stop. No joke! When I read this I couldn't help thinking of the chicken claiming "I'm an eagle." I am still waiting for the confetti parade :-) De-Hyping Stan 19:45, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Just so that we're clear on his "comparison" of himself to Charles Lindbergh, here's the actual quote from the WIRED article: "Some people refer to us as the Wright brothers," he says, holding up his champagne. "But I prefer to think of us as Charles Lindbergh, because he was better-looking." TNeloms 06:05, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Apparently the guy who made this inappropriate comparison with the Wright brothers was Tony Tether himself, the organizer of the race, and also ex-Stanford. To summarize: Tether is from Stanford, the Stanley team is from Stanford, Wired magazine is sitting next to Stanford ... it really looks like a bunch of Stanford people hyping each other. Truecobb 21:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Hard But Not Prohibitively Difficult
For events like these, we will never be able to tell how hard it really was. How hard was it to beat the human chess champion with a computer? And how hard wss it in hindsight??? People who participated (like myself) know that this was a difficult race, but not prohibitively difficult. That's why hundreds of people decided to work on this challenge. The fact that five teams finished is a major accomplishment for the field of robotics, especially given the 2004 results.

I suggest that rather than discussing individual articles about the race, we should really focus on how to turn these accomplishments into technology that can benefit us all, such as safer cars. It'll be a long way to go.

And for those who think the race was a piece of cake, feel encouraged to participate in the next Grand Challenge. This will be your opportunity to show to the world how easy this all is.

How Hard?
Above someone wrote: "The fact that five teams finished is a major accomplishment for the field of robotics, especially given the 2004 results." IMHO this statement is not extremely convincing. What does it tell us about the difficulty of the course when so many teams managed to finish in time, including an insurance company without any prior experience in robotics? And how impressive are the Grand challenge results to those who know what the fast robot cars of Ernst Dickmanns achieved 10 years ago (long distance trips in traffic at up to 110 mph)? ERDI 18:58, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

"boot" -> "trunk"
This was an American contest with an American car built by Germans, won by an American team from an American university. There is no reason to use the British word for the storage area in the back of a car. --76.208.22.50 04:12, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Pronouns
Has Stanley ever been referred to as a "he" and not "it"? Even though the car really doesn't have a gender, "Stanley" is a male name. dogman15 (talk) 21:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Information on how Stanley was built
I put together an article on how we built Stanley here: http://knol.google.com/k/cedric-dupont/building-stanley/QVKExjdp/J7jVSQ. I don't think I should include this content in the main page since this would be shameless self-promotion, but if someone is interested in the background story (and I figure some people monitoring this page might) check it out. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.210.234.193 (talk) 05:16, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Location
I was just at the Smithsonian, Stanley is back there, so I'm changing the page to reflect this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Telepheedian (talk • contribs) 20:28, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

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