Touareg Touareg among the favorites as DARPA Challenge starts.

[Yperion]

Gentlemen , start your autonomous engines! Tomorrow contestents whose robot-car entrants passed the DARPA Grand Challenge semifinals this week will test their mettle in a grueling 175 mile race through the Mojave desert starting and ending in Primm, Nevada. The bots have no more than 10 hours to make the trip—that’s a slowest average speed of 17.5 miles to qualify as winner, that is, if they don’t flip or crash or stall or become aflame within a few miles of taking off like they did last year. Participating this year in addition to the private firms are such prestigious institutions as CalTech, Cornell, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon (both teams), Princeton, and Virginia Tech, all duking it out for the two million dollar purse at stake; but perhaps more importantly, the mad bragging rights honor of being the first winnner of the competition. We also hear there’s a stretch limo entrant this year, so keep an eye out for those guys: robot tracking begins at 6:00AM PDT/9:00AM EST tomorrow morning. Check back here for the latest!

 

[Yperion]

Touareg won the 2 million dollars chalenge:

There were Hummers, custom-built dune buggies and even a 14-ton truck with six axles, but a robot named Stanley left them all in the dust.

The diminutive, self-guided Volkswagen Touareg built by Stanford University's School of Engineering covered more than 131 miles of Nevada desert in seven hours Saturday to be the first vehicle to cross the finish line in the $2 million Grand Challenge robot race.

It marked the first time a robotic vehicle successfully finished the race within the 2-year-old event's 10-hour time limit...

 

[warot]

That thing was a crock of .... here's the real scoop that you won't read about.
My e-theory teacher is part of the team for Virginia Tech, my college. Here's our team... about 40 students, a few teachers and 2 golf cart looking things... we came 8th place. Total spending money, about $70,000.

The team that won, not only had all teachers on the team, but also had VW engineers from Germany!! How's that for advantage? They had about 5 T-regs in case things happened. 5! They spent millions on this project.

Glad to say though, that we came 8th place... not too shabby considering our school was much more student oriented. I'm thinking about joining that team in a year or 2.