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Photo by Anne Burke
Team leader Richard Mason with Golem 1 in the Mojave Desert. Sister truck Golem 2 is UCLA's entry in an Oct. 8 robotic vehicle race. |
UCLA team preps for $2m race across desert
by anne burke
today staff writer
In the rugged Mojave Desert east of Palmdale, a 3/4-ton pickup truck dodges creosote bushes and boulders as it lumbers along a trail made muddy by a summer cloudburst. With an amber emergency light on the roof and laser radars mounted on the front grille, the truck looks like something out of a Mad Max film, minus the revenge-seeking road warrior behind the wheel. In fact, nobody is driving the truck at all.
“Golem 2,” as the truck is called, is UCLA’s entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge ’05, a robotic-vehicle race set for Oct. 8 in southwest Nevada. Twenty vehicles from around the country will hurtle across the Mojave Desert in a winner-take-all scramble for a $2-million purse put up by the sponsor, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Pentagon. The first vehicle to cross the finish line within 10 hours wins the prize.
“If anybody can win, we can win,” said Jason Meltzer, a UCLA doctoral student who helped build the truck. “I guess the real question is whether anybody can win.”
The course will wind through as many as 175 miles of harsh and uneven desert terrain, beginning and ending at Primm near the California-Nevada border. Vehicles must maneuver around, over or under shrubs and hills as well as manmade obstacles such as spiky tank traps. “You run into one of these things at 30 miles an hour, and that’s the end of your truck,” said UCLA lecturer and RAND engineer Richard Mason, co-founder of the Golem Group team.
Golem 2 will rely on various kinds of sensors, among them laser radar, optical, and GPS, to act as its eyes as it attempts to avoid obstacles and stay on course on race day. Inside the cab, laptop computers will process the data, then send signals to the steering wheel, accelerator and brakes.
The goal of the competition is to stimulate research and development of unmanned vehicles that could save American lives on the battlefield. The first Grand Challenge took place last year, but the $1-million purse went unclaimed when none of the vehicles completed the course. The top finisher was Carnegie Mellon University, which sank at least $1.2 million into a Hummer that caught fire when it veered off course and got stuck in an embankment after traveling 7.4 miles.
Golem 1 was the dark horse entry of last year’s race. Funded by Mason’s $28,000 “Jeopardy” winnings, the 1994 Ford F-150 was given the second-to-last starting position and the team’s name was misspelled on official souvenir T-shirts.
Defying expectations, Golem 1 came in fourth, traveling farther on a dollar-per-mile basis than any of its competitors, said Stefano Soatto, UCLA Vision Lab director and co-principal investigator for the project with Emilio Frazzoli, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
The sad end for Golem 1 came at 5.2 miles, when the truck failed to climb a steep hill due to a safety limit on its accelerator. The team has corrected the problem and added performance-boosting features that should give it a good shot at the prize, Mason said.
Golem 2 also received a cash assist from the university; $260,000 came from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Vice Chancellor for Research Roberto Peccei, and Soatto and Frazzoli’s discretionary funds. Corporate sponsors donated equipment valued at more than $150,000.
Despite the sizable stakes, members of the Golem Group insist they’re not in it for the money.
“Being able to save lives by creating a robot to do something extremely dangerous in the battlefield is a pretty valuable thing,” said Eagle Jones, a doctoral student at UCLA.
Spectators can follow the action live on race day at www.darpa.mil/ grandchallenge. To learn more about UCLA’s entry, visit www.golemgroup.com. |
