DARPA Grand Challenge: Ten years on

Further to raise the bar, DARPA conducted a third competition, the Urban Challenge, in 2007 that featured driverless vehicles navigating a complex course in a staged city environment in Victorville, California, negotiating other moving traffic and obstacles while obeying traffic regulations. Six teams out of eleven successfully completed the course. The “Tartan Racing” team, led by Carnegie Mellon University, placed first in points awarded based on time to complete and ability to follow California driving rules and won the $2 million prize.

DARPA notes that it is not easy to quantify the effects of these DARPA challenges on the development and deployment of autonomous vehicle technology, but ten years later defense and commercial applications are proliferating. The rapid evolution of the technology and rules for how to deploy it are being driven by the information technology and automotive industries, academic and research institutions, the Defense Department and its contractors, and federal and state transportation agencies. Within DoD, some of the efforts to improve upon and deploy autonomous ground vehicle technology include:

Today, three other DARPA challenges are building on the DARPA Grand Challenge prize-based competition model:

  • The Spectrum Challenge is a competition to demonstrate a radio protocol that can best use a given communication channel in the presence of other dynamic users and interfering signals, with a goal of enabling reliable communication in a congested environment. The challenge includes head-to-head competitions between competing teams in a structured test bed environment. The Spectrum Challenge Finals will occur 19-20 March 2014 at DARPA.
  • The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) has a goal of developing robots for use in responding to natural and man-made disasters. The DRC was structured with three planned competitions to allow teams time to incorporate lessons learned from one event to the next. Teams are currently preparing for the third and final planned competition, the DRC Finals. Strong performance by the teams in the second event, the December 2013 DRC Trials, encouraged DARPA to increase the difficulty of the final round. The results of the DRC Finals will give DARPA, DoD, and industry a preview of what is possible with robots.
  • The Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) is a tournament for fully automated network defense. Similar to computer security competitions played by expert software analysts, the CGC will require automatic systems to reason about software flaws, formulate patches, and deploy them on a network in real time. The CGC aims to unite program analysis experts with the computer security competition community to bring automation research out of the lab and into the field.

DARPA says it expects that, like the original Grand Challenge before them, these challenges will encourage new waves of research and development that will spur continued innovation, encourage commercial investment, and lower the cost of advanced technologies.