DARPA Grand Challenge (2005)
The second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was a 212 km (132 mi) off-road course that began at 6:40am on October 8, 2005. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.32 mi) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race. Five vehicles successfully completed the course:
| Vehicle | Team Name | Team Home | Time Taken (h:m) |
Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stanley | Stanford Racing Team | Stanford University, Palo Alto, California | 6:54 | First place |
| Sandstorm | Red Team | Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 7:05 | Second place |
| H1ghlander | Red Team Too | 7:14 | Third place | |
| Kat-5 | Team Gray | The Gray Insurance Company, Metairie, Louisiana | 7:30 | Fourth place |
| TerraMax | Team TerraMax | Oshkosh Truck Corporation, Oshkosh, Wisconsin | 12:51 | Over 10 hour limit, fifth place |
Vehicles in the 2005 race passed through three narrow tunnels and navigated more than 100 sharp left and right turns. The race concluded through Beer Bottle Pass, a winding mountain pass with sheer drop-offs on both sides. Although the 2004 course required more elevation gain and some very sharp switchbacks (Daggett Ridge) were required near the beginning of the route, the course had far fewer curves and generally wider roads than the 2005 course.
The natural rivalry between the teams from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon (Sebastian Thrun, head of the Stanford team was previously a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon and colleague of Red Whittaker, head of the CMU team) was played out during the race. Mechanical problems plagued H1ghlander before it was passed by Stanley. Gray Team’s entry was a miracle in itself, as the team from the suburbs of New Orleans was caught in Hurricane Katrina a few short months before the race. The fifth finisher, Terramax, a 30,000 pound entry from Oshkosh Truck, finished on the second day. The huge truck spent the night idling on the course, and was particularly nimble in carefully picking its way down the narrow roads of Beer Bottle Pass.
Read more about DARPA Grand Challenge (2005): National Qualification Event (NQE), Race, Race Participants
Famous quotes containing the words grand and/or challenge:
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)