Robot car tech shifts into high gear

A $2m race in the desert earlier this month proved that artificially intelligent robots can drive autonomously over rugged terrain and long distances. But will the technology be relevant to average drivers?

If you ask the masterminds behind the robots, the answer is "yes, it's just a matter of time".

Vehicles powered with artificial-intelligence software and sporting the ability to 'see' the road with external sensors will be a staple in the US military within ten years, under a mandate from Congress that spurred the desert robot rally. The underlying technology also will find its way into popular cars with features like collision and lane-departure warnings and adaptive cruise controls. The technology is also relevant, experts say, for the disabled and for automating machines.

"It's not just about a bright idea. There's a lot of work to do. That business of development and productisation and building an enterprise is a lot harder than creating a technology," said William 'Red' Whittaker, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. So much robotics research has been done at Carnegie Mellon that CMU's hometown of Pittsburgh is known as 'Roboburgh' in some science circles.

For Stanford University, the winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge robot desert race and its $2m prize, the goal has long been to make vehicles safer for the road.

Stanford set out with the particular interest of developing technology that would help carmakers include aids that could cut down on the number of traffic deaths caused by inattention or intoxication. Now Stanford has $2m to invest in improving its technology and artificial intelligence research, under the direction of robotics professor Sebastian Thrun. Volkswagen, which sponsored Stanford's vehicle, Stanley, and donated a Touareg V5 for the race, is also developing this technology for its line of cars.

The next frontier will be to develop technologies that can help vehicles improve city driving, as opposed to motoring off-road or on highways, where there are no stoplights or pedestrians. The race gave the robots a structure for driving the course. But on the motorway or in cities, intelligent vehicles won't have that direction.

"We've been working on the war on cancer, but with this technology we're a lot closer to saving more lives -- young lives -- through accidents, by giving attentional aids," said Gary Bradski, a machine-learning expert at Intel who worked on Stanley. "The question is how to alert people without causing an accident."

Four autonomous vehicles -- Stanford's Stanley, Carnegie Mellon's H1ghlander and Sandstorm, and Gray Insurance's Kat 5 -- drove a tricky 132-mile course in the Mojave Desert. They were the first unmanned cars ever to complete the race designed by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the US Department of Defense.

And after only two years of hosting the DARPA Grand Challenge, the US military says it has accomplished its goal of fostering innovation in artificially intelligent designed vehicles. Within ten years, such vehicles are supposed to make up a third of the US army's transportation.

The technology has already made its way into contractor machinery, and some of the cars showed surprising resilience.

H1ghlander had engine problems on the day of the race, which caused it to finish 40 minutes late and ultimately lose the $2m to Stanford University. Despite its trouble, the car still finished -- a testimony to the system software's sturdiness, Carnegie Mellon's Whittaker said. "On its worst day it can run anything," he said.

The same sturdiness is exhibited in robots used by two companies spun out of Whittaker's robotics research. One is RedZone Robotics, which uses robotic machines to make maps of sewer systems. Whittaker also founded Workhorse Technologies, unmanned robots to explore and make maps of mines.

The technology is also being deployed in earth-moving and construction machines from Caterpillar, which was one of the major sponsors of CMU's Red Team.