(Bluefield)—With a dream as large as its resources are limited, an intrepid team of Bluefield State College students and faculty members travels to Tucson, AZ this week to prepare for the final stage of qualifying, before October’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) “Grand Challenge” autonomous ground vehicle race through the Mojave Desert. After DARPA’s site visits are completed, approximately 40 teams will be selected to compete for the Grand Challenge’s first place prize of $2 million.
BSC faculty members Bruce Mutter and Dr. Robert Riggins will spend about ten days in Tucson, along with BSC students Lenny Lewis, Mark Myers, Heather Williams, Jared Tomasek, Jacquetta Huntley, Joshua Mullins, and Jessica Brown, to prepare for DARPA’s May 5 site visit. The Center for Applied Research & Technology (CART) at BSC has collaborated with Dwaine Jungen, president of Preferred Chassis Fabrication for more than eight months in developing “Scorpion-fox,” an autonomous (unmanned) robotic vehicle capable of navigating the rugged desert terrain by combining the capabilities of a durable, versatile chassis with the technology to react appropriately to environmental and terrain challenges. Team CART is delivering to Jungen’s headquarters in Tucson, AZ the technology package it has developed at BSC, uniting the brains and brawn of the vehicle and continuing pre-site visit testing.
Team CART is now one of only 118 teams (out of an original field of more than 220 teams and more than 800 participants at DARPA’s kickoff meeting) to advance through the first five stages of qualifying to reach the site visit round. The site visits are an essential element of the qualification process for the Grand Challenge and will enable a realistic assessment of a vehicle’s potential to complete the event’s demanding course.
DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 is a field test of autonomous ground vehicles for the purpose of advancing autonomous vehicle technology. The vehicles must travel about 150 miles over rugged desert roads, using only onboard sensors and navigation equipment to find and follow the route and avoid obstacles. DARPA will award $2 million to the team whose autonomous vehicle completes the 2005 route the fastest, within a ten-hour time period. All teams are developing their vehicles without federal government funding.
April 26, 2005
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