At the DARPA Urban Challenge

Events, Personal, Research, News

No matter how jetlagged you might be, no matter what time zone your body thinks it should be in, getting up before dawn always is a struggle for me. So it was this morning, as we headed out for the DARPA Urban Challenge.

A lot of people from CMU are here. An incomplete list: Ryan O’Donnell (and his s.o., Zeynep), Seth Goldstein, Randy Bryant, Matt Mason, Cleah Schlueter, Cindy Chemsak, Bill Swisher, Dan Jenkins, Phil Lehman, Tina Carr, and many, many others. Of course there is the entire Tartan Racing team, led by Red Whittaker and Chris Urmson.

The first impression one gets when arriving at the scene: Wow this is a big event! As many of you know, I go to major auto races quite often, and the feeling was very similar. Here is a picture of the crowd, as we walked from the parking area to the main event tent:

DARPA has really turned this PR opportunity into a major media event, and done so quite successfully. Indeed, from the main event tent we could see the webcast, which was as slick as any college football broadcast. Even the Mythbusters crew of Jamie Hyneman and Grant Imahara were on hand to do the color commentary. Here is a picture of the crowd in the main event tent:

You can read all about the Urban Challenge itself by going to the main web site (easily accessible from the SCS home page), so I won’t recap it here. And anyway, we won’t know the final judge’s results until tomorrow morning. But it is fair to say that the situation looks very, very good for CMU and Tartan Racing. Due to a glitch caused by DARPA (which they acknowledged and apologized for), Tartan Racing’s Boss robot started the race about half an hour behind the other leading bots. (This delay won’t count, fortunately.) By the end, it had passed all of them except for Stanford’s Junior, and even in that case Boss was mere seconds behind at the finish.

Furthermore, Boss seemed to run an exceptionally clean race, making moves decisively and gracefully. I see no reason why it won’t fare extremely well in the subjective scoring.

Here we see Boss and Junior side-by-side at the finish, clearly the class of the field, and by any measure Boss’ performance was not only superior, but dominant.

Congratulations to the entire Tartan Racing team!

Another aspect of the great attention that this event draws is the opportunity to meet with many of the leaders of various technology fields. And, since I flew my father and my son to the race (three generations of Lee’s at the race!), they also got to meet some very interesting people.

For example, here is a picture of my son, Harry, with Larry Page.

Larry was extremely gracious, putting up with a lot of fawning, picture-taking, autographs, etc. He also had some very interesting things to chat about, including the question of what the world (and in particular academic world) would do if it could build a “billion-dollar computer”. Larry during the discussion pointed out that he is building a billion-dollar computer, and of course these leads to natural questions about what this means. Seth Goldstein was pretty quick to say that his “Build a Brain” concept would be “only” a quarter of a billion. Larry asked for a proposal. ;-)

Finally, Bill Swisher (director of corporate relations for CMU), seeing that my son was sporting a new iPod Touch, had the brilliant suggestion of asking people to autograph it. So, here is a picture of perhaps the most unique iPod in the world, with a stamp by the King Abdullah University (KAUST), and very nice autographs by Larry Page and Steve Wozniak!

Peter Lee @ November 3, 2007