said later. “It was really a failure of Carnegie Mellon’s engine that made us win, no more and no less than that.”
“It was very much a winner-take-all event,” Urmson recalls, more than a decade later. “It sucked. There was no prize for second. This had been three years of people’s lives at this point. It was brutal. I remember seeing Red afterward, and that was the most distraught I’d ever seen him.”
“It’s right up there with the worst shortcomings of one’s life,” Red says, assuming full responsibility for what he still regards as a defeat. “I let a team down. I let a lot of people down. And in a lot of ways, in a bigger way, I let down a community and a world that didn’t see the best of the technology and the movement and the vision of what things could be.”
“It was a strange feeling,” Urmson says. “It was a day that five vehicles did something believed to be impossible. Our team had pulled together and achieved the impossible. We’d done the impossible—and yet we’d lost.”
HISTORY HAPPENS IN VICTORVILLE
An introverted engineer looks at his shoes when he talks to you. An extroverted engineer looks at your shoes.
—UNKNOWN
The second DARPA Grand Challenge was successful on numerous fronts. The $2 million prize was perceived as a cost-effective way to spur progress in the field of mobile robotics. The large number of entrants, the public enthusiasm and media attention for the challenge event, and the fact that the race resulted in five vehicles that could travel 132 miles through a difficult desert landscape all contributed to a perception throughout the military of money well spent.
But inside DARPA, there remained a sense that the mission hadn’t yet been accomplished. No team had constructed a robot that could navigate the chaotic urban environments of Iraq or Afghanistan. Could a similar event spur the robotics field to make more progress?
Thus came the idea of the DARPA Urban Challenge, which would be staged in a city landscape, rather than a desert. Tether announced the event in April 2006, setting the date for November 3, 2007, and soon saw a globally diverse field of eighty-nine teams registered to compete, less than half the number of the previous contest, perhaps because this version of the challenge was perceived to be much more difficult.
Some of the format changes seemed designed to stifle the approach that Red Whittaker’s team had pioneered in the first and second races—the one that had used a group of human map techs to essentially pre-drive the race route for the robots. DARPA planned to sprinkle the course with moving obstacles, namely, other automobiles driven by Hollywood stuntmen and professional drivers. As well, many different teams would be navigating the urban environment simultaneously.
The key to this event was satisfying the objectives DARPA wanted the robots to execute throughout the course—and DARPA wouldn’t disclose that information until five minutes before start time. In fact, DARPA was so secretive in the lead-up that for a time they even declined to disclose which state would host the competition. “We knew it was going to be cold outside, so they’d probably do it somewhere that had warm weather,” recalls one participant. “But that was the only thing we knew … They didn’t want anyone pre-programming the system. They wanted some element of intelligence and route planning and control in the robot.”
The rules required the robots to drive sixty miles in six hours through an urban environment while obeying the rules of the California Driver Handbook. The challenge would require that the robot navigate a standard North American parking lot well enough to be able to maneuver into an available space. While neither pedestrians nor cyclists would be allowed on the course, the robots would have to navigate one of the most difficult elements of driving for human operators—deciding how to proceed through an all-way-stop intersection where other drivers have arrived at about the same time.
“The Urban Challenge was much harder, in terms of what the vehicle needed to do,” recalls Urmson. “The algorithmic steps we’d taken for the first two challenges were predicated on the world not moving. Once other things start moving, it’s nowhere near as easy.”
The inspiration here was to automate the operation of battlefield convoys. A military truck in Afghanistan or Iraq is transporting food to a distant village. An IED explodes somewhere ahead, and the automated convoy would have to navigate around the disturbance without running into any medics, civilians or other members of the convoy. That’s about as dynamic an environment as is possible.
There was no question that Carnegie Mellon would enter the race. There was some question whether Red would lead it. Previously, Whittaker’s Red Team had been a take-all-comers effort populated by undergraduates, volunteers, grad students or the odd full-time employee of Whittaker’s Field Robotics Center. But this time around, DARPA was pledging a million dollars of research funding to a selection of the best-run teams. Carnegie Mellon was one of the recipients. As well, the stakes felt higher this time. There was the $2 million prize. In addition, Carnegie Mellon was competing for its reputation as the nation’s top robotics center. It needed to win. “That’s a lot of money and so [the university administration] wanted to make sure we could win it,” Urmson recalls. Ultimately, Whittaker retained his leadership of the Urban Challenge team, but this incarnation featured other senior members of the Robotics Institute faculty—the university’s equivalent of a supergroup.
Some in the university felt that this new group was so different it deserved a different name. Red Team had been appropriate in the past because it had been Red Whittaker’s baby. But this Urban Challenge was the best squad that Carnegie Mellon could assemble. Some of the veteran members of Red Team resented the rebranding. “It made no sense to us,” recalls Michele Gittleman, Red’s assistant at the time. “Everyone knew Red Team. The brand had already been established. We had hats, T-shirts, jackets.” Nevertheless, to reflect the sense that this was a new effort, fully backed by the university, the Carnegie Mellon team rebranded itself as Tartan Racing, in a nod to the nickname given the university’s sports teams, itself a reference to founder Andrew Carnegie’s Scottish heritage.
This latest effort was going to require a lot more than a million dollars to fund. So in 2006, Whittaker came and visited me at the General Motors Technical Center. “Why do you think you’re going to win this challenge?” I asked him. “Dust,” Whittaker replied, explaining that the robots created by many other teams treated dust clouds as impermeable obstacles, unable to be driven through, while Carnegie Mellon’s software and sensors were able to correctly tell that dust represented no obstacle at all. Although dust represented a comparatively small factor at the actual Urban Challenge, the answer convinced me. I liked Whittaker from the moment I met him. With his military bearing and his eminently American positivity, his confidence that ingenuity and hard work could solve any problem if you persevered, he struck me as a throwback to an earlier era of technical innovators, the sort of people who pioneered the automobile a hundred years before. I arranged for GM to back Tartan Racing in numerous ways. The corporation would end up providing Whittaker’s team with $2 million in support, making us the team’s lead sponsor. We also provided the services of some of our top engineers, and embedded one of them, Wende Zhang, with the Tartan Racing team in Pittsburgh. Tartan Racing’s vehicle would become a 2007 Chevy Tahoe dubbed “Boss,” after my long-ago predecessor as General Motors’ vice president of research and development, Charles “Boss” Kettering. Other sponsors also donating funding included the construction-equipment maker Caterpillar; the auto-parts supplier Continental; and Applanix, a manufacturer of GPS systems.
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