Annals Of Inanity–RoboRace: Best not to be a jackrabit in the desert this weekend on a line between Barstow, CA and Primm, NV. Because that’s when up to 25 robotic vehicles will be racing the 250 miles of sand, scrub and ravines that separate the two towns (basically it’s LA to Las Vegas). The vehicles will be entirely autonomous–no human control or input allowed–and if any of them can survive the course and get to Primm in under 10 hours they will receive Dr. Evil’s favorite sum: One…Million….Dollars. The contest–called the Darpa Grand Challenge— is geek nirvana and is the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is always looking for innovation. So what are the challengers like? Well, let’s see. At the brutish end of the scale there’s a Humvee that’s decked out with a full Itanium server, cameras, radar and laser range-finding sensors. This baby will try to go around obstacles, but its builders from Carnegie Mellon are hoping its got the grunt to go over and through them, too. At the other end of the scale–the elegant, graceful end–there is “Ghost Rider,” a motorcycle that uses a highly sophisticated inertial measurement unit similar to that of the Segway to stay upright, while it weaves its way around obstacles detected by its front-mounted camera. And in the middle, there is a stripped out Dune Buggy with an electric motor, a generator, and a buttload of computing power onboard. “I like to think of our vehicle as a cockroach scuttling across the floor,” says the builder. “It goes pretty quickly; it’s not that intelligent; it doesn’t see everything in great detail, and it doesn’t see anything directly in front of it.” (Okay, I’m not putting my money on this one). Gentlemen, I mean microprocessors, start your engines! This thing is going to be a riot, with a lot of twisted metal and fried computers littering the desert….



A Hummer with no driver? Now, there’s a good idea….

(Photo: Red Team Racing)