like how slowly Stanley progressed once it had crunched Montemerlo’s data. So one week, when Montemerlo went away on vacation, Thrun set Stanley to go 20 percent faster.
Then came the day in 2005 when Thrun received an unexpected visitor at his Stanford office. He looked up and saw a figure in the doorway. The figure came forward and introduced himself: “Hi,” the man said. “I’m Larry Page.”
Thrun knew who Page was, of course. What surprised him was how interested Page was in the project. “Larry’s always been a robotics enthusiast,” Thrun says, explaining that had Page not started Google, he might have pursued a PhD in robotics. Page was fascinated with Thrun’s project. He had about a million questions. He wanted to see how real the technology was—how close are driverless cars? A century? Decades? A couple of years? What did Thrun think? In fact, Page was so interested that he told Thrun he planned to attend the second Grand Challenge. Through their shared enthusiasm for driverless cars, Thrun and Page developed a friendship that deepened, because the two men both relished taking on tasks that everyone else dismissed as impossible. Thrun had no idea, at that point, that Page would change the course of his life.
At 4:30 A.M. on October 8, 2005, the day of the race, DARPA officials provided a Red Team member a USB key featuring a computer file of 2,935 waypoints—the course of the second Grand Challenge. The whole of the route totaled 132 miles, starting and ending in Primm, Nevada.
The next bit bore many similarities to the first race. The team member sprinted to Red Team’s command center. Another member loaded the route network definition file onto Red Team’s shared hard drive. A computer program analyzed the waypoints and added thousands more, so a route originally specified every eighty yards now featured a dot every yard or two. Next, the route was divided up among team members to go over. The pre-planning team went through each part of the route to ensure the new waypoints kept Sandstorm and H1ghlander on navigable road.
In the anxious moments that passed while the pre-planning team worked, Whittaker, Urmson and Peterson discussed strategy. The experience of the first race eighteen months before was fresh in everyone’s minds. That time, they’d gone for speed. And perhaps they’d pushed Sandstorm beyond what was good for it.
So the three decided Red Team should take a tortoise-and-hare approach with its two vehicles. One of the vehicles would take it easy, going so slowly that it would be certain to finish the race. This way, in the event that no one else finished, at least Red Team would have a vehicle that crossed the finish line.
Sandstorm consistently came in 10 percent slower than H1ghlander—a symptom, the engineers thought, of the way the electronics box floated, which made it difficult for the robot to pinpoint exactly where it was. So H1ghlander would be Red Team’s hare, while Sandstorm was the tortoise.
In terrain the pre-planning team classified as moderately difficult, H1ghlander would go 20 percent faster than Sandstorm. In very safe territory, Whittaker decided that Sandstorm was allowed to go 27 mph, while H1ghlander was able to go up to 30 mph—an increase in speed of 12.5 percent. H1ghlander, Red said, should target to finish in 6 hours and 19 minutes, for an average speed of 21 mph. And their safety, Sandstorm, should finish in 7 hours, 1 minute.
Urmson and other Red Team members watched the race from Stanford’s tent, because Stanford had the best view. H1ghlander was first out of the starting chute. And in the initial few miles, it led the pack. Then, nearly seventeen miles in, H1ghlander faltered. The engine stalled and the vehicle came to a stop, then started again. Coming up on a hill, it stalled again. This time, the robot actually rolled backward. It crested the hill on a subsequent attempt, but still, nothing like this sort of engine trouble had ever happened in testing.
Red Team had people stationed at designated viewing points that DARPA had set along the course. Reports came back that another engine stall likely happened fifty-four miles into the race. The stalls prevented the engine from turning a generator that created electricity for the sensors. Backup batteries were able to provide some power, but not enough for the main LIDAR unit. That was set in a gimbal, which a helicopter camera crew revealed was positioned at a ninety-degree angle to the direction of the robot’s travel, rendering it completely ineffective.
The disabled robot slowed so much that the second entry to leave the chute, Stanford’s Stanley, caught up to H1ghlander at mile 73.5. DARPA had promised its contestants that their robots would be navigating a static environment, meaning nothing could move in any of the contestants’ fields of view. To prevent Stanley and H1ghlander from confusing each other, DARPA used a radio transmitter to “pause” Stanley for 2 minutes and 45 seconds, allowing H1ghlander to go ahead, creating some territory between the two robots. But soon after Stanley was reactivated, the robot caught up to H1ghlander a second time. This time DARPA paused Stanley for 6 minutes and 35 seconds. But Stanley caught up to H1ghlander a third time. Finally, at mile 101.5, 5 hours, 24 minutes and 45 seconds into the race, DARPA paused H1ghlander and allowed Stanley to take the lead. “Stanley has passed H1ghlander,” Tether announced in the observation tent, prompting Thrun to leap into the air in triumph.
Shortly after, and with an elapsed time of 6 hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds, Stanley became the first robot ever to autonomously complete a DARPA Grand Challenge. Tether himself waved the checkered flag as Stanley passed the finish line.
Sandstorm launched at about 6:50 A.M. The robot rumbled out of its chute with its characteristic diesel knock. It made it through underpass one, two and three even though a software bug prevented the LIDAR from detecting the walls. In fact, it performed flawlessly until 6 hours and 30 minutes into the race, when it just scraped a canyon wall in the narrowest section of the route. Sandstorm drove over the finish line 7 hours and 4 minutes after it left the start chute—a variation of only about 1 percent from what the engineers had asked of the robot. It had done exactly what it was assigned to do in remarkable fashion, placing second, by time. And in third, limping into the finish, was H1ghlander, with an elapsed time of 7 hours and 14 minutes, or 55 minutes longer than the time the Red Team had set for it. All told, five robots finished the course.
Thrun was elated, of course. Later that day he and his team gathered onstage to receive a check for $2 million. But what was just as gratifying was the way the victory felt like a validation of the whole robotics field. More than a decade later, public attitudes toward roboticists have markedly changed. Back in 2005, robotics was associated in the public imagination with projects like Thrun’s 1998 Minerva museum tour guide—as novelties, curiosities that had little effect on anyone’s day-to-day lives. A self-driving car was different. Sure, the second DARPA Grand Challenge was a controlled scenario separate from the actual world because nothing else on the course was allowed to move. But it nevertheless represented a step toward actual robot cars, which everyone realized would, if they ever became a reality, transform lives. Standing up before reporters frantically scribbling down their words, photographers and videographers capturing their images and a crowd of people cheering their accomplishment, Thrun and his teammates relished the attention as validation that the world might finally recognize the potential of their chosen field.
Thrun was magnanimous in his victory. “It’s really been us as a field that were able to develop these five vehicles that finished the race,” Thrun said. “It’s really been a victory for all of us.”
Few on Red Team felt that way. It stung that they had devoted months to test Sandstorm and H1ghlander on some of the toughest roads on the planet—and then discovered on race day that the course was easier even than the well-graded roads that had marked the first Grand Challenge. It stung, too, that based on its performance in the qualifying events, a fully functioning H1ghlander would have taken the race. And it stung that, had Red Team’s leadership allowed Sandstorm to perform to its abilities, rather than playing it safe and limiting its speed, the older
