As Sandstorm turned the first corner and began to disappear into the open desert, the laser scanner found a clear path ahead and the detailed map data said it was time to accelerate. Sandstorm’s wheels spun, kicked up dust and carried it away at over 30 mph.
For Chris Urmson and his teammates, the moment resonated. This was the first time they left their robot out of sight and out of their control. There was nothing more they could do. No more testing, no more repairs. Sandstorm would finish the course or not. And the first big test was only a few kilometers ahead. The trick to getting over Daggett Ridge was mastering the hairpin turns, hairpin turns that were so tight that following a GPS path could easily tumble a vehicle off the trail and down hundreds of feet. That includes a misaligned sensor or some software glitches. However, if you could overcome that hurdle, the surface was flat again and roads mostly clean, sailing almost smoothly up to Primm.
During the next 20 minutes, three more vehicles left the gate, following Sandstorm’s path. It looked like Tether was going to get quite a race, even after some very shaky appearances in the qualifying lap. Then the problems started.
Sixth of the line was Axion Racing, a group of friends from San Diego funded by an investor in a company that imports bottled water from Micronesia. In the previous year, software leader Melanie Dumas, an engineer who once wrote off the Grand Challenge as impossible and not worth trying, had seen her skepticism and reluctance turn into growing optimism.
She had seen her team’s Jeep driving in this kind of terrain and she drove well. She even thought that with luck, it could surpass Carnegie Mellon’s Sandstorm. When the flag flew, the jeep pulled out of the parachute and smoothed the first turn. But as it approached the first narrow gate, it turned again. All around it. There was no apparent reason for the turnaround. Perhaps the sensors found the opening too tight. Maybe something else had happened. It didn’t matter. As the jeep drove back to the start line and steered its pursuer back like a linebacker, Darpa hit the emergency stop. Axion’s Grand Challenge was over in seconds. Dumas was devastated.
Next up was the University of Louisiana six-wheeled Cajunbot. It hit a wall as it came out of the slide, knocking it out of battle. It was followed by Ensco’s tub of a bone. As the flag waved, it stood frozen for a few seconds, rolled forward, stopped, and started again. It drifted to the left, where the edge of the road sloped upward, tipping to one side before landing on level ground again. Then it went left again, this time too far. It turned and landed on its side, 300 meters on a 142 mile course. The entire run lasted 1 minute and 6 seconds.
A group of students from Palos Verdes High School had spent the night before the race scrambling to fix their vehicle’s steering knobs. At the last minute, they came up with a solution that they hoped would work, without time to test it. Their prayer went unanswered. Their entry, Doom Buggy, didn’t change at all. It rolled out in a straight line and hit a concrete barrier after 50 meters.
SciAutonics I, led by an engineer who had worked on Germany’s autonomous driving efforts in the 1980s, saw his ATV stray off the trail and never return. (The SciAutonics II made it about seven miles before getting stuck on an embankment.) The University of Florida’s Cimar strayed off course half a mile and got caught in a wire fence. Terramax, the 14-ton, lime-green, six-wheel military truck, drove 1.2 miles before getting stuck between a pair of small bushes that mistook its sensors for unshakable obstacles. Tired of seeing swinging back and forth like a driver trying to escape from an impossibly tight parallel parking lot, Tony Tether ordered the murder.