NI3: The Net Result of Imagination, Innovation, and Investment
Saturday, March 27, 2004
In line with the theme of the DARPA Grand Challenge, here are the Robolympics.
 
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Steve Wozniak attended the race with the Red Team. I got a quick photo of him on his Segway. I later got to meet him and shake his hand.
 
This photo has got to make you think about man becoming slaves to the machines. This was quite humorous.
 
Highly favored to win the race, the Red Team made their appearance in Primm late in the evening. Amazingly, their vehicle did drive into the lot after an engine fire on the course. One of my colleagues got a short video of the vehicle driving in.
 
Team TerraMax had the most awesome vehicle on the course, weighing in at approximately three tons. Oshkosh is the maker of the vehicle and was the corporate sponsor. Amazingly, this is the smallest vehicle they make. There are some 2,600 of these types of vehicles in the field with the US Army and Marines today. It was obvious why the Army and Marines wanted Oshkosh in the race; to determine if they could retro fix existing inventory to become autonomous. One of the most amazing facts about this vehicle is that it had seven multiprocessor Pentium servers on board that could not process navigational data fast enough. How could this be when all of the other vehicles didn’t even have the physical space on board to house computing power like this? My guess is that TerraMax was using a deterministic approach to navigation, taking into account a lot more data points given its size, and had a lot more sensors than the other vehicles. Check out my interview with the Oshkosh project lead, Don Verhoff, at IT Conversations.
 
The Cajunbot was a very cool little vehicle. It was one of the only vehicles with a deterministic navigation system. Deterministic in that it used maps in addition to GPS, lidar, and sonar to help it steer itself. You can catch my interview with Scott Wilson of Team Cajunbot at IT Conversations. The team was serving crawfish gumbo in their tent, which was absolutely amazing. (Yes, that is my shadow. I'm still learning.)
 
A.I. Motorvators had the most awesome external design of all of the vehicles in the race. You can catch my interview with CJ Pederson from A.I. Motorvators at IT Conversations.
 
Cyberrider was probably one of the best designed vehicles to enter the race. This team had quite the following. You can check out the team’s web site here. I wish I had interviewed them. Their vehicle looked like it had a ton of interesting features. Jim Nista from Team Cyberrider did call into the IT Conversations studio for an interview.
 
This vehicle was quite interesting. Check out the interview I did with Brian Mee of Team ENSCO at IT Conversations.
 
This vehicle was built by Palos Verdes High School. They did actually qualify and race, but no one from the team hung around to chat with the press and spectators. I’ve got to believe that one of the student’s parents must have donated the vehicle.
 
I didn’t get a chance to talk to the Virginia Tech team, but here is a photo of their vehicle. They didn’t qualify for the race either.
 
This was one of the most unique vehicles in the lot. Team LADIBUG didn’t qualify for the race, but it had some very interesting features including "wings" to assist with stabilization and a roll detection system for deploying the "wings." Check out the interview I did with Warren Williams of Team Phantasm at IT Conversations.
 
SRA International had set up satellite tracking of the race. They had projected this on a movie screen in the arena. This would have been very cool if the race had gone beyond seven miles. You can see all of the participants clustered at the starting line.
 
Okay, so I am finally getting around to processing my photos. This one is of the welcome sign at the press booth. We got there rather early compared to other media folks. The rest of the media corps arrived around 3pm, including CNN, NBC, and Reuters.
 

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