Keeping up with Darpa's challenges is a good way to see into the future a couple of their current projects:<p>1) A machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency which is INSANELY fascinating and, if they pull it off, hugely impactful -> <a href="https://spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com" rel="nofollow">https://spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com</a><p>2) A program to build technology to drive “swarm sprint” exercises to inform tactics and technologies for large groups of unmanned air and ground robots in urban environments. Yes, like how do we build a collaborative air drone army.<p>And PS they are having a hacker fest in the bay in a couple of weeks, registration is closed but bet you can get in if you email via - <a href="https://darpahackfest.com" rel="nofollow">https://darpahackfest.com</a>
It certainly seems to validate the strategy of "grand challenges" to focus research. One could argue that the X prize helped spawn today's commercial space companies. So does this mean a good way for benevolent billionaires to improve the world would be to sponsor things like this? Certainly Gate's sponsoring the toilets prize was influential in bringing out better sanitation ideas.<p>I wonder if anyone would sponsor a prize for an 'off grid' sustainable living space. People create slums and homeless encampments out of a variety of cast off materials, is there a way to create housing for people which would be safer and enhance their quality of life without also creating a public burden? Perhaps that is a pipe dream but it is something I wonder about.
I would argue that the 2004 DARPA challenge was a failure with the best car, Sandstorm, only going 7 miles before getting stuck on a rock. That led to a do-over in 2005 that was really the first success.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2004_Grand_Challenge" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2004_Gra...</a>
The DARPA grand challenges were an important step for autonomy, by demonstrating basic capabilities and bringing attention and industry funding to the field, but overhyping the expertise gained there may have held the field back over the years. The hardest part of building a self-driving car has proven to be robust perception (processing sensor data to create a very accurate representation of the dynamic environment), which is an aspect that was not heavily emphasized in the challenges: for instance, the winning entry in 2005 had $500K worth of Lidar on it, and the cars were given a GPS map, which allows very accurate localization with yet another expensive sensor (differential GPS). By all accounts I'm aware of, the perception software involved in the challenges was rudimentary, and a lot of the effort was spent on mechanical engineering and path planning. Most importantly, robustness cannot be demonstrated in a one-off competition. Building robust perception is a hard AI problem, and the expertise required to tackle this aspect is orthogonal to the robotics aspects demonstrated in the challenges (which are also obviously very important).
There was a great "Nova" episode on the Grand Challenge [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/about.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/about.html</a>
It was 13 years from the Wright Flyer to the first commercial fixed-wing aircraft. And that was still very dangerous. Jet engines (which really introduced the safety we are used to in airlines) took 50 years.
Proving that one (or something) can drive is a far cry from proving that one can safely drive in a wide variety of changing conditions around other drivers. I would however argue that many people don't actually possess the latter ability, and I think 'robots' will get there before we as a species do.
Putting what everyone is saying more abstractly; solving a constraint satisfaction problem in a nice and closed domain should not make us surprised that it isn't as quick to deal with when lifted to an unbounded and messy space.
It was common lore in CS grad school that there were self driving cars, funded by DARPA, driving around the CMU campus back in the 90s.<p>It was not as easy to look things up. I am glad this story is being told, but I'd love to know about the history and the early days.
StartUp's most recent podcast episode is related:<p><a href="https://gimletmedia.com/episode/grand-challenge-season-6-episode-7/" rel="nofollow">https://gimletmedia.com/episode/grand-challenge-season-6-epi...</a>
This video of the 2007 Urban Challenge has some excellent footage and questionable fashion choices: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xibwwNVLgg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xibwwNVLgg</a><p>(I'd also like to mention my appreciation for Bloomberg for not only publishing such articles as this, but also for actually linking to other interesting content not published by them)<p>Edit: Another find down the youtube rabbit hole: <a href="https://youtu.be/DkdESqML41g?t=3h47m30s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/DkdESqML41g?t=3h47m30s</a> has 9 hours(!) of slow-motion robot tragedies.
Always-connected self-driving vehicles in many ways seem like something that would be a dream come true for the government and intelligence/law enforcement agencies (not to mention the advertising companies currently developing some of those vehicles).
I was just telling someone about this the other day. In college at UF, I produced dozens of video segments on engineering student projects, and the DARPA challenge was among the biggest deals, and that was now a decade ago. It wasn't on anybody's radars (so to speak). It's funny how even a little bit of progress suddenly flipped the concept into the popular imagination.
In 2007 (when the first iPhone was released), it had been (at least) 15 years since "phones proved they could run apps" [1]. Knowing a limited version of something is possible doesn't tell you a lot about the road to commercialisation and widespread acceptance.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#cite_ref-schneidawind_8-0" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#cite_ref-schneidawi...</a>