n the predawn hours

of Saturday, Novem-

ber 3, 2007, the for-

mer George Air Force

Base, in Victorville, Calif.,

was a beehive of activity

as industry and academia teams made a flurry of

last-minute adjustments to nearly a dozen of the

most unusual vehicle platforms to ever run in a mil-

itary competition.

Called Urban Challenge, the event marked the

third major robotic competition organized and con-

ducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects

Agency (DARPA).

January 2008 n ARMY 37

DARPA’s Latest Robotic Competition Focuses on Urban Environment

By Scott R. Gourley

“We are the central research organization for the Depart-ment of Defense, conducting leading-edge and far-out pro-jects that push the boundaries of technology,” explainedDr. Norman Whitaker, DARPA’s program manager for Ur-ban Challenge. “We’ve been looking at the problem of pro-tecting people on the battlefield for quite a while now. Un-manned aerial vehicles have been very successful; they areused extensively in the military context. We’re now look-ing at ‘the ground problem’ in terms of unmanned groundvehicles.”

DARPA’s first significant competition focused on theground problem was conducted in March 2004. CalledGrand Challenge, the event included a 142-mile desertcourse between Barstow, Calif., and Primm, Nev. Fifteenautonomous ground vehicles attempted the course, but thebest performance only stretched seven miles, and the $1million cash prize went unclaimed.

Asecond Grand Challenge, held 19 months later,showed a quantum leap in robotic vehicle technolo-gies. Similar in scope to the first, the October 2005event required vehicles to complete a 132-mile

desert route in southern Nevada in less than 10 hours. “We had 195 entrants and had five finishers cross 132

miles of desert,” Whitaker said. “A tremendous amount ofenergy was built as a result of that event.”

“These are vehicles that are fully self-contained,” henoted. “You put them on the starting line, push the button

and they go. There’s no remote control. It is totally underthe control of its own computer.”

In determining the path forward, DARPA plannersshifted focus from an autonomous cross-country desertvenue to a course that would introduce aspects of modernurban operational environments.

“I was out here in January when we discovered this areaas a place where we could run vehicles down the street; ifthey crashed into a building or ran off the road, theywould not cause any damage,” Whitaker said. “This area isa closed military base that is used for MOUT (military op-erations in urban terrain) training, so it closely resemblesthe type of environment our troops face overseas.”

Initial DARPA solicitations drew 89 applicants for UrbanChallenge, a figure that was later reduced to 36 afterDARPA site visits and analysis.

“For the past week or so, we have had 35 teams here[one of the 36 selected semifinalistssubsequently withdrew] at the formerGeorge Air Force Base, where wehave been testing them on the rudi-ments of urban driving,” Whitakersaid. “The problem of urban drivingis difficult because basically everymission ends or begins someplacewhere there are people, vehicles,buildings and roads nearby. In orderto build truly safe systems, we de-cided to provide metrics by whichthey would be judged.”

He added that those performancemetrics were roughly based on theCalifornia Driver Handbook.

“We have taken that handbook andlooked at what human drivers wererequired to do: 15-year-olds—howwell can they drive? And we havetried to impose that level of skill onthe robots,” he said.

Once at the Victorville site, the 35teams participated in a national quali-fication event (NQE) from October26–31.

Whitaker explained that the NQEinvolved different test areas.

“One test area included left turns across traffic. The vehi-cle had to be able to pull into a busy two-lane road withtraffic coming in both directions. It was challenging for avehicle to be looking in both directions at the same time,predicting when the other vehicles would arrive at the in-tersection and then determining when it was safe to pullin. That’s very tough,” he said.

He noted that another test area mandated that the au-tonomous vehicles enter a large parking lot through anopen gate.

“There was a fence there—they didn’t know there was afence—and there was a gate that was open, but they didn’t

38 ARMY n January 2008

SCOTT R. GOURLEY, a freelance writer, is a contributing edi-tor to ARMY Magazine.

Unmanned vehicles enter the starting chutes at Urban Challenge,a competition for robotic platforms organized and conducted byDoD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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40 ARMY n January 2008

know where that was. They had touse their sensors to detect that and gothrough it,” he added.

Other qualifying events rangedfrom movement down a narrow,winding street populated by other ve-hicles to actions involving bothmanned and other unmanned vehi-cles arriving at a four-way stop.

“We were assessing whether theyacted too aggressively and went earlyor whether they were not aggressiveenough and just sat there and staredfor a while and then waited for every-thing to clear,” he said.

“After all that testing we had a sense of ‘who’ was ableto do all the skills correctly,” he added.

Eleven of the autonomous vehicle teams survived theNQE process and started the final event. Althoughthe majority of the finalists were university teamsthat relied on robotic modifications to small commer-

cial vehicle platforms, at least one industry finalist, TeamOshkosh Truck, had developed a new autonomous variant

of its Marine Corps MTVR (medium tactical vehicle–replace-ment) logistics vehicle.

DARPA representatives noted that one of the most signifi-cant milestones represented by Urban Challenge involvedthe interaction between autonomous vehicles.

“The vehicles that are going to go out today have beenextensively tested against human drivers, to see if theycould merge safely, yield turns, handle intersections, parkthemselves between cars and generally behave well onstreets with other traffic being driven by humans,” ex-

plained Dr. Tony Tether, DARPA di-rector. “What we really don’t knowis what they are going to do whenrobot meets robot. We haven’ttested that, and today is going to bethe first time in the whole world,that I know of, that not only arethese autonomous vehicles going toperform against human drivers butperform against each other. I’mholding my breath, quite frankly.”

To mark the start of the finalevent, Tether then released sev-eral dozen background vehicles—manned vehicles that were oper-ated on the closed course—to fur-ther expand the decision-makingchallenges for the autonomous par-ticipants. The background vehicleswere soon followed onto the courseby the 11 autonomous finalists,with each of those platforms. Eachof those robotic systems was ac-companied by a manned chase ve-hicle that could trigger an emer-

The team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which included fac-ulty and students as well as engineers from the C.S. Draper Laboratoryand undergraduates from Olin College, entered a vehicle called “Talos.”

“Skynet,” Team Cornell’s entry,integrated technologies into

the modified chassis of astock sport utility vehicle. The

challenge, a 60-mile course ina mock city environment, took

place in November 2007 inVictorville, Calif.

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January 2008 n ARMY 41

gency kill switch in the event of serious malfunction.As the vehicles entered the course, they moved around a

large traffic circle before heading out on particular roads toperform a specific series of missions and sub-missions thathad been introduced through a mission data file that wasdownloaded to the vehicle computer before each mission.

“There are roughly 10 miles of roads out there,” Whitakersaid. “The vehicles will make use of the highway that goesaround the base. At some point all of the vehicles will be re-quired—probably three or four times—to drive down a dirtroad, pull safely onto a highway and go 30 miles an hourup the highway. If you haven’t seen these types of vehiclesbefore, you’ll think it looks a lot like a truck with some gearon top, going relatively slowly. But once you’ve watched itfor an hour or so you realize that one of these vehicles, go-ing even 10 miles an hour, is really fast, especially if you’revery close to where it’s traveling.”

DARPA also stationed approximately 100 observers outon the course to grade vehicle performance at stop signsand other traffic decision points.

“The unusual behaviors that we have seen so far arethings we didn’t imagine,” Whitaker said. “For example,we’ve been surprised in almost every task that the robotdecides to plan a different route and go on some other roadthat we didn’t know the robot knew about. So we’re stilllearning.”

The final event required the vehicles to complete 60miles in six hours. The distance was divided into three ma-jor missions, with the vehicles returning to the startingpoint for sensor cleaning and new mission data file down-loads after the first two phases.

Five of the teams had been pulledoff the course by the start of thesecond mission, leaving sixteams to conduct the last two se-

ries of missions: Team Stanford, TeamVictor Tango (Virginia Tech), Team BenFranklin, Team Cornell, Tartan Racing(Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute/General Motors) and Team MIT.

As if echoing the ancient biblical ob-servation that “the race is not to theswift,” DARPA representatives repeat-edly stressed that Urban Challenge

“Odin,” which finished in third place, navi-gates the course. Victor Tango, a team ofVirginia Tech students and faculty, in con-junction with engineers, has competed inthe two previous DARPA challenges.

Top, “Little Ben” was the entry of the Ben Franklin Racing Teamwhich included the University of Pennsylvania, Lehigh University,Lockheed Martin, Oxts and Thales. Middle, Team Oshkoshbelieves large size is preferable for robotic vehicles designed toprovide logistics support in combat and fielded “TerraMax.”

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was not a race, but rather an event in which the winnerwould be predicated on a long list of criteria and very com-plex scoring procedures conducted by observers.

Just as DARPA had its own representatives observingand scoring around the course, the crowds also in-cluded a smattering of requirements planners inArmy combat uniforms, backing U.S. Army Training

and Doctrine Command patches, seeking their ownground truth regarding the applicability of autonomousvehicle technologies for today’s warfighters.

As for Urban Challenge, DARPA announced Tartan Rac-ing’s “Boss” won the $2 million cash prize as the competi-

tion’s first-place winner, Stanford Racing’s “Junior” wonthe $1 million second-place prize and Victor Tango’s“Odin” won $500,000 for finishing third.

“Every time we have had one of these, we do a biganalysis at DARPA to decide what is the next [step],”Whitaker observed. “How do we move the field forward?”

Referring to the congressional guidance to convert one-third of the logistics fleet to autonomous operation by2015, Whitaker acknowledged that this would be “a‘stretch goal’ for the agency.”

“Replacing a third of the vehicles in the fleet— just that,never mind making autonomous vehicles—is a very, veryaggressive goal,” he said. M

While fully autonomous operation may still be a “stretch goal” for near-term implementation, otherJoint service organizations have been exploring otheroptions for near-term/low-cost application of semiau-tonomous technologies in support of the warfighter.

One recent example of this exploration took place justtwo days before Urban Challenge, when the U.S. ArmyResearch, Development and Engineering Command’s(RDECOM) Tank Automotive Research, Developmentand Engineering Center (TARDEC) hosted a demon-stration of its convoy active safety technologies (CAST)integrated onto the family of medium tactical vehicles(FMTV) at Fort A.P. Hill, Va.

Program descriptions noted that CAST “is designed todevelop a low-cost robotic convoy capability for currentforce tactical wheeled vehicles with the target cost of a ro-botic retrofit kit under $20,000 per vehicle. Although ro-

botic convoy technology has the potential to increase thecapability of current force vehicles, this aggressive goalcan be achieved only through extensive research and de-velopment of diverse and low-cost sensing modalities.CAST experimentation will develop key robotic convoytechnologies that balance capability and cost by takingan objective look at the utilities of a semiautonomousnavigation system for sustainment convoys.”

The demonstration was co-sponsored by the JointGround Robotics Enterprise and the Joint Center forUnmanned Ground Vehicles in conjunction with theRobotics Systems Joint Program Office and the Com-bined Arms Support Command’s Support Battle Lab.Additional partners in CAST testing include represen-tatives from the Army Research Laboratory, Air ForceResearch Lab, PercepTek, DCS, Auburn University andthe University of Florida.—S.G.

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Only six of 11 final-ists that started therace made it to the

finish line. TartanRacing’s “Boss”

took first place and$2 million; Stanford

Racing’s “Junior”finished second

and won $1 million.

42 ARMY n January 2008