On March 13, 2004, at dawn, fifteen vehicles left Barstow, California, heading for the Mojave Desert. They did not have a driver. Their mission was to travel more than 200 kilometers of hostile terrain to Primm, Nevada, without anyone at the wheel or remote control in between. The first to do it would win a million dollars. No one got it.
Objective: operate without a driver. The DARPA Grand Challenge It was a competition organized by the United States Advanced Defense Projects Agency, the same organization that once laid the foundations for the Internet. Congress had set a goal that, by 2015, one-third of military ground vehicles could operate without drivers, thereby reducing the risk to soldiers on resupply and transportation missions in war zones.
To accelerate that research, DARPA decided to open the door to anyone, whether they were universities, hobbyists, or independent engineers. It was enough to present a vehicle capable of driving itself.
In detail. Twenty-one candidates passed the previous qualifying tests, held at the California Speedway circuit, and fifteen vehicles arrived at the starting line of the desert. There was everything from SUVs, to pickup trucks, and even modified motorcycles with computers, radar, cameras, and GPS receivers to “see” the terrain and decide for themselves how to navigate it.
The route, about 228 kilometers, was not revealed until two hours before departure, precisely to check that the systems were capable of interpreting the environment in real time and not memorizing a route in advance.
ORAn almost comical disaster. one of the cars it capsized as soon as it started and had to withdraw before the official start. Two others did not even start the test. Three hours into the race, out of a limit of ten, only four vehicles were still running. The rest fell due to mechanical failures, blocked brakes, broken axles or navigation systems that lost direction.
According to collect the specialized magazine IEEE Spectrum, the image offered by the exit was “the most diverse collection of vehicles gathered in one place since the filming of Mad Max 2.”
Who went further. The vehicle that advanced the most It was Sandstorm.a 1986 Humvee modified by Carnegie Mellon University’s Red Team. It traveled 11.9 kilometers before getting stranded on a slope in the terrain after exiting a horseshoe curve, according to the university itself. The impact broke front axles and burst wheels, and fuel began to spill from the tank.
Its manager, robotics professor William “Red” Whittaker, acknowledged that the car arrived “injured” to the test, as it had overturned during a test the previous week and the team barely had time to fully repair it. Shortly after, another of the vehicles, nicknamed DAD (Digital Auto Drive), became immobilized. and it caught fire before those responsible for the event deactivated it remotely. No team exceeded 12 kilometers of a route that was supposed to exceed 200.
It wasn’t entirely a failure.. Although the million dollars remained without an owner, DARPA considered that the experiment had fulfilled its real function: to demonstrate that there was a community of engineers, students and programmers willing to solve a problem that until then seemed like something out of science fiction.
The day after the disaster in the desert, the agency announced that it would repeat the test a year and a half later, this time with two million dollars.
And the revenge arrived. On October 8, 2005, in a new edition on a 212-kilometer route, five vehicles completed the route for the first time in history. The winner was Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg by the Stanford University team led by German engineer Sebastian Thrun, who crossed the finish line in 6 hours and 53 minutes. Sandstorm itself, now repaired, came second.
The real impact came later. That race through the desert ended up being the seed of the autonomous car industry as we know it today. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin They came in disguise to witness the 2005 test and, shortly after, Thrun was hired to lead Google X, the company’s experimental projects laboratory.
There, along with other DARPA test veterans such as Anthony Levandowski, Chris Urmson and Mike Montemerlo, Thrun launched in 2009 the secret project that would eventually become Waymo, today one of the main autonomous car companies in the world. Stanley itself, the 2005 winning car, is currently preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
And now what. Two decades after that first failed test in the desert, driverless cars They are already circulating through the streets from cities like San Francisco, Phoenix or Shanghai, and companies like Waymo or Tesla are committed to autonomous taxis becoming commonplace. In Spain we will briefly see some doing tests this year in Madrid. Although the really curious thing was that, a test in which most of the cars made fools of themselves, ended up being the real starting point of a technology that today moves billions of dollars.
Cover image | Lemonodor
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings