began their efforts brainstorming what sort of a vehicle they would use. DARPA had announced the course would be designed by Sal Fish, the operator of such tough off-road races as the Baja 1000. Red Team figured it would have to be prepared for a course that would wind through dry river gulches, box canyons, mountain ridges, rocks, sagebrush and cliffs. So the robot they designed had to be able to either get around such land features or drive over them.
No idea was too outrageous to be considered. One of the first suggestions was a giant tricycle that had wheels seven feet in diameter. The team discussed using a Chenoweth combat dune buggy, a low-slung contraption on four fat tires favored by mercenaries and warlords. Other brainstorming options included construction equipment, an all-terrain vehicle and a tank. But the team ultimately opted for pragmatism. After all, Whittaker figured the budget to develop the robot would be around $3.5 million. Labor aside, $725,000 of that entailed the cost of the products required to build the vehicle. Whittaker was crisscrossing the country to find sponsors. Intel, Boeing and Caterpillar all kicked in some money. Google, which everyone thought of as a search engine company at this point, sponsored Red Team to the tune of $100,000 after Whittaker visited its headquarters in Mountain View, California, and met both Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But such funds wouldn’t go far when you were trying to build the fastest-ever robot car. Red had bought a cattle ranch a couple of hours east of Pittsburgh in the early nineties because he felt his academic life was too sedentary and sought physical activity that worked his muscles, not his mind. In September 2003, with the March 2004 race date fast approaching, Whittaker finally bought the vehicle that would become their robot from another farmer in the area.
Some in the class were astonished when they saw it. Shouldn’t a self-driving car look cool, and polished and, um, high-tech? The vehicle Red had procured was the opposite of high-tech. It was a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle M998: a Humvee, battered by time. It was seventeen years old. No one had any idea how many miles it had, because the vehicle didn’t have an odometer. Nevertheless, the price was right: $18,000. The key thing was, it worked.
Whittaker was under a lot of pressure. Around the country, dozens of robotics enthusiasts were working to create entries for the challenge; so many, in fact, that DARPA was requiring everyone to submit a detailed and academically rigorous declaration of the approach they planned to take. The step was intended to limit the race entrants to serious competitors. There were high school students and bored mid-career engineers. Several were former contestants on the mechanical-gladiator game show, BattleBots, which featured remote-controlled robots fighting to the death, or at least, deactivation. Regardless of where they came from, the competitors all seemed to have one goal in mind: Beat Red Whittaker’s team. Why was the CMU team in so many other people’s sights? Whittaker’s team was the biggest, with thirty members. It was one of the best funded. And many also believed that it was DARPA’s hoped-for winner.
Red’s leadership style was to take a bunch of people, introduce the problem to them, set ambitious and clearly defined goals that reflected progress toward the solution—and then get out of the way. He’d drop in regularly to check in and apply pressure on his charges. Such visits could be intense. According to a Wired article, Whittaker once drew an analogy between developing robots and the labor required to construct the enormous historic monuments around the Nile. “If you’re in Egypt building the pyramids, you’ve got to have slaves,” he said. The implication? Whittaker’s students were his slaves. One of Red’s longtime students, Kevin Peterson, who would become Red Team’s software lead, had attended Princeton High School, where he encountered Dr. Anthony Biancosino, the domineering music teacher on whom Damien Chazelle loosely based the bandleader in the 2015 movie Whiplash. Peterson responded to Whittaker’s style, he says, in part because he’d already been through his experiences at Princeton with “Dr. B.” “There was an ethos around both of them of being larger than life and somewhat mysterious,” Peterson recalled. “The idea that you need to work hard to be part of their exclusive team if you want to join them. They’re both up to big things and you need to be a badass to be on the team. Funny thing is, both of them would accept and build anyone who had that level of dedication. It’s more about hard work than initial skill.” One of Whittaker’s favorite motivational anecdotes placed his charges in the roles of the Inuit in the Arctic, who had to decide which strategy to use when seeking out food. Are you going to go out and try to find a few berries and bits of lichen? Whittaker would ask his team. Or are you going to find and kill the walrus that feeds the whole village?
Sometimes it was hard to tell what Whittaker meant by his stories. Peterson interpreted this one as a challenge. Were you going to go about your life just getting by? Or were you the type who was going to go out and give your best effort to do something awesome?
Realizing that his course would require more work than they were prepared to give, some people dropped Whittaker’s class. The ones who remained essentially dropped every other one of their classes and just worked for him. Peterson was one of the ones who remained. He gave up his social life, as well as communicating with his family. He even gave up sleeping. Several months in, he became so sleep-deprived that he fainted. The problem was that he was going down a set of stairs when he did. He hit his head, was taken to the hospital to be assessed—and was back working on the project within a few days.
Empowering inexperienced and sleep-deprived graduate students who were totally committed to the project’s success could create some unusual situations. One morning, Whittaker and Urmson arrived to check in on the students and volunteers and were met with the results of one of these hyper-caffeinated work sessions: Their treasured Humvee no longer had a roof. Working through the night, one of the student team members had decided that the Humvee’s interior didn’t have enough room to store the batteries and computers and actuators that the self-driving equipment would require. So he went and got a Sawzall and cut through each one of the Humvee’s roof pillars, essentially decapitating the vehicle.
This was the sort of initiative that would typically have been applauded by Whittaker. Except the impromptu roof amputation wasn’t really necessary. Even if the equipment couldn’t fit in the Humvee’s cab, they could have ripped out some seats, or mounted additional equipment on the Humvee’s roof. Removing it made the vehicle illegal to drive on public roads. From then on, whenever they wanted to take the Humvee to the sort of wide-open space where they could test it, they would have to tow the vehicle—an ignoble start for a robot that was supposed to drive itself.
To provide the Humvee with the ability to drive itself, Red Team essentially reverse-engineered the sensory tools humans use to help them drive. The vehicle needed, for example, eyes to see—and so the Red Team procured several types of LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices. The LIDAR’s job was to shoot out beams of light and sense when the beams bounced back. Precisely calculating the timing of the beams’ return allowed the LIDAR to determine how close the sensor was to the object that the light beam bounced against. Repeated thousands of times per second, the LIDAR could create a rudimentary picture of the world outside the vehicle.
The main LIDAR sensor would allow the robot to detect obstacles seventy-five meters ahead. Three supplemental LIDAR devices scanned a wider field of view within twenty-five meters of the robot’s front end. A stereo-vision processing system represented a different way to use light to detect objects, employing a pair of cameras. But the cameras and LIDAR might have trouble penetrating the dust clouds that could arise on sandy desert roads. To provide a sense of the world in dusty conditions, Red Team also bought a radar system that used sound to detect obstacles.
To control the vehicle’s direction and speed, Red Team wouldn’t be able to use a foot on the gas pedal or a hand on the steering wheel. Actuators would take their place. Essentially, these were electric motors that twisted, pushed or pulled—to make the vehicle accelerate, brake or turn left or right.
Sitting in the center of all that was a series of
