DARPA's Grand Challenge Draws 'Unorthodox' Suggestions

by Terry Costlow

Next March, a few dozen unmanned vehicles will leave the Los Angeles area, hoping to get to Las Vegas in less than 10 hours. The winner will hit the jackpot, taking home $1 million, courtesy of a government entity known for taking gambles.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is betting that plenty of new technology will emerge as teams from universities and corporations vie for the prestigious “Grand Challenge” award (www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/). The teams can create vehicles of any size or shape, but the vehicles must require no human intervention to cover the approximately 300-mile route.

The teams’ goal will be to design vehicles that can move across rough terrain — likely to include surfaced and un-surfaced roads, trails, off-road areas, and man-made and natural obstacles both above and below the surface — and be the first to complete the designated course within a specified time limit. In turn, DARPA is interested in related technology that can be incorporated into military vehicles that can be sent off and forgotten about until they’ve arrived at their destinations. Some of today’s military vehicles accomplish this objective, but they’re slow and have major problems with minor terrain obstacles. DARPA hopes the Challenge will result in solid advances in sensing, behavior and mobility.

Marking a new way for inventing cutting-edge technologies, the Challenge is the first time DARPA is offering a significant cash prize — an approach normally associated with radio stations trying to boost ratings.

“It’s a bit surprising, but DARPA is always trying to innovate, not only in technology but also in the ways to come up with it,” said Mark Pullen, a former DARPA program director, now Associate Director for the Center of Excellence in Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence at George Mason University. Pullen predicts that if the race is successful, DARPA will use similar creative approaches to fulfill its mission: to promote the development of new technology and foster its transition to products that the military can use.

So far, success seems likely. “We wanted to attract people who were not part of our mainstream, getting outside of our usual supporters,” a DARPA spokesperson said. About 75 groups, ranging from off-road specialists to amateur robotics groups and others, submitted vehicle proposals, providing an interesting mix. Underscoring the key drive behind many DARPA efforts, the spokesperson noted that many proposals were “unorthodox.” And although many of the proposals didn’t make the cut for the actual race, some of the ideas will likely attract further interest from DARPA researchers.

Though DARPA is known for advanced research, only about five percent of its budget is targeted to basic research and to exploring technical and scientific programs to see what useful items they might yield. “DARPA’s main focus is looking at technology to solve particular problems. Basic research is more pure science, more like what the National Science Foundation supports,” Pullen said.

Five percent may be small, but it represents a fair amount of funding, since DARPA’s total expenditures amounted to roughly $2.7 billion during fiscal 2003. The Agency spends most of its budget on creating new capabilities for national security by accelerating knowledge in focused areas and moving it into use. In fact, 40 percent is devoted to what are considered high-risk, high-payoff component technologies.

IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer will share the Grand Challenge results — and the potential technology yield in the late spring of 2004.

 

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Terry Costlow has written about the electronics industry for more than 20 years, covering a wide range of technologies and topics.