then for no apparent reason, swerving off course and running itself through a chain-link fence before Urmson could activate the e-stop. Sometime later, with Sandstorm liberated from the barbed wire and the deadline approaching, Whittaker gathered Urmson and everyone else around him, according to Gibbs. Sure, the December 10 deadline approached—but even if it passed, Whittaker vowed, they’d continue their work, through tomorrow, and even the next day if necessary, until Sandstorm achieved the 150-mile goal. “We say what we’ll do, and we do what we say,” vowed Red in Scientific American.
Then it started to rain—a frigid December drizzle that soaked clothing and chilled to the bone. Sandstorm was not well protected against rain. One of the dozen or so team members still on site spread a tarp over the robot’s computer equipment. Red wasn’t around. Gibbs wrote that Urmson looked at his teammates, shivering in dripping lean-tos under blankets. He thought about the possibility of the falling moisture disabling one of their sensors, or shorting out a processor. Perhaps he also thought about his wife and baby boy back home. And he decided to send the team home.
Whittaker was livid when everyone showed up to the Coke Works the following day, Gibbs reported, comparing the team leader to “an angry coach at halftime.” He ranted about all the sacrifices they’d made to try to achieve the 150-mile goal. The shop was a mess, the robot unpainted, the website out of date—all that work went undone as everyone concentrated on getting Sandstorm in the sort of shape required to make its race run. To a roomful of people unwilling to meet his gaze, Whittaker said, “Yesterday we lost that sense deep inside of what we’re all about. What we have just been through was a dress rehearsal of race day. This is exactly what the 13th of March will be like. We’re in basic training; this is all about cranking it up a notch. Come March, we will be the machine.” Whittaker concluded his venting, Gibbs reported, by asking who was willing to work all day, every day, for the next four days, until they completed their nonstop 150-mile run. Fourteen team members in the room raised their hands. Including Urmson.
Two days later, U.S. soldiers captured Saddam Hussein in a spider hole near Tikrit, and the war in Iraq dominated headlines and the cable news channels as it never had. Every day, the news seemed to feature more casualties from IEDs in Iraq or Afghanistan—fatalities Red Team members hoped the robot vehicles might one day prevent. Then the overseas conflicts supplied Urmson with an idea.
In recent years, maps had become a crucial component of successful robotics. Maps allowed robots to locate themselves in the world much more accurately than GPS alone. A technique called simultaneous localization and mapping, abbreviated to SLAM, saw a robot scan an area with LIDAR to map the permanent landmarks—in exterior spaces, things like trees, light poles, road curbs and buildings. Then, the next time the robot traveled the same territory, it would consult its map and compare its position relative to the previous landmarks, to get an ultra-accurate idea of where it was. Problem was, Sandstorm couldn’t use this technique, because DARPA was keeping the race location secret.
Then, one day, Urmson was watching coverage of the war on one of the cable news channels. The scene will be familiar to anyone who lived through the post-9/11 period—a grainy portrait of an SUV traveling fast along a remote desert road. From somewhere in the distance, a rocket blazes into the picture, collides with the SUV and obliterates the vehicle in a blast of dust and metal.
The footage of the successful deployment of a laser-guided bomb was captured by a camera-equipped drone aircraft. The drones flew above the conflicts to provide imagery of the Iraqi and Afghan territories. Drones were searching Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda hideouts that might shelter Osama bin Laden. They were scanning Iraq for nests of Ba’athist loyalists.
If the U.S. military could use drones to obtain imagery of places so hostile and remote, Urmson thought, then such imagery would soon be available for the entire world. And perhaps, Urmson reasoned, that same type of imagery could be used to simplify the robot’s task. They weren’t able to use LIDAR to scan the race course in advance, because no one on Red Team knew where the race course was, but they did know the race went across the Mojave Desert—and maps existed of that, didn’t they? In fact, portraits of the Mojave had already been built by entities like the U.S. Geological Survey and the military.
“We realized we didn’t have to do SLAM,” Urmson recalled. “Because it was becoming clear there would be a global database [of maps] available … So why not use them?”
If Red Team members could give Sandstorm an accurate map of its surroundings before the race, they could remove a time-intensive step from the computational task. The new approach reframed the challenge. The team had assumed they were trying to build a robot that could sense the world so well, it could discern a road in the desert and navigate it safely for 150 miles. Using maps meant the robot could be told in advance where the road was, and how to drive it. The method had the potential to allow Sandstorm to travel much faster than it otherwise might.
But first, Red Team’s undergraduates, pauper grad students and volunteers would have to build the most detailed map of the Mojave Desert ever assembled. It was an enormous task, but Red Whittaker’s students were accustomed to achieving enormous tasks. A portion of the team set to procuring high-res maps of the whole of the Mojave Desert, a relatively simple matter, given Whittaker’s and Spencer Spiker’s defense contacts. Now the team set about using the maps to plot routes through the Mojave. They also dispatched two engineers, Tugrul Galatali and Josh Anhalt, to drive as many roads in the Mojave Desert as possible in a rented SUV with video cameras sticking out the windows, capturing imagery from the ground in what amounted to an early, rudimentary execution of Google’s Street View idea.
The next step saw the Carnegie Mellon mapping team comparing the footage and the map to assign each area with a value—what they called a cost. So a ridge or a cliff that would wreck Sandstorm if the robot went over it would get a cost of infinity. A smooth road or a dry, flat lake bed likely would have a cost of zero. Sandstorm’s computers then were programmed to direct the robot to drive the route with the lowest cost.
One evening, with just weeks to go before race date, the senior members of Red Team met in the loft of Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics building. “We were making some progress, trying to map every trail in that whole desert,” Urmson recalls. But at some point during this meeting in the loft, Urmson realized their work wasn’t happening quickly enough. “It became clear we weren’t going to get there,” he said. Too many different potential routes existed. By the time the race date arrived, they would have mapped out only a small portion of the possible routes.
That was the point that Red Team came to its second epiphany. To reduce the possibility of exactly this sort of advance route planning, DARPA had told the teams that its staff would wait to disclose the precise course until just two hours before the start—at 4:30 A.M. the morning of the race. Red Team was getting good at creating routes through the desert. So what if they changed strategies? What if, rather than focusing on creating a map that featured a pre-driven route along every single conceivable trail through the desert, they instead became really good, and blindingly fast, at teaching Sandstorm to drive a single trail?
Rather than a perfect map, they thought, why didn’t they focus on creating a single, perfect route? One they could plan out in the two-hour span between the time DARPA disclosed the approximate course and the start of the race? The old way involved using the maps and the route planners during the months before the race to effectively pre-drive every single road through a desert that covered a territory of fifty thousand square miles. This new way involved focusing on a single 150-mile path that the planning team would examine in fine detail—and doing it in the 120 minutes that passed after DARPA disclosed the race route.
From that moment on, one part of Red Team focused on executing the second epiphany. In the old high bay in the Planetary Robotics building, about a dozen
