Self-driving car experts recall blips along the road to 2007 DARPA win
Andrew W. Moore, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, looked out over a room filled to the brim with “the creme de la creme” of self-driving vehicle experts.
There were faces he hadn’t seen in years — people who now head autonomous vehicle outfits like Argo AI and Aurora Innovation.
A celebration of a 2007 win in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Urban Challenge brought this motley crew back together for a weekend — the unifying connector in a room full of software engineers, roboticists and computer scientists from across the country who are now competitors.
For just a moment, the old friends put their own races to create a fully autonomous system on pause to remember a glorious victory.
At a 10-year anniversary celebration at Phipps Conservatory in Oakland last week, Red Whittaker — the roboticist who led the school’s autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe called “Boss” to the victory — called the win and accompanying $2 million in winnings “transformational” to the self-driving industry, igniting innovation at CMU and beyond.
“It’s such a privilege to do this kind of thing,” Mr. Whittaker said, looking back with laughter, despite several rather time-consuming and laborious hiccups that he and his teams experienced over the years.
In March 2004, the first DARPA Challenge in the Mojave Desert yielded no winner — but CMU’s converted Humvee, “Sandstorm,” traveled the farthest before ultimately getting stuck on a rock.
Sandstorm had been 24 minutes ahead of the next car at one point, but then slowed down.
“The dang thing stops,” Mr. Whittaker said. “It goes backward and forward. The engine stopped.
“People asked what was this good for, and who the hell cares?” he said.
The Stanford Racing Team beat two CMU vehicles by a matter of seconds during the following challenge — a heartbreaking defeat after countless hours of testing, debugging, engineering and even personal sacrifice following the first challenge.
Today, some of those visionaries who built cars that caught on fire and ran into rocks, yet sometimes made it through 60-mile courses without human drivers, now work for and even lead top self-driving car outfits like Aurora Innovation, Delphi and Argo AI.
Since the first DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 when CMU’s winning vehicle traveled only
about 7.5 miles autonomously, the industry has exploded and Pittsburgh has been a part of that.
After Uber opened up its self-driving cars to passengers here a year ago, Delphi announced in August it would nearly triple its team of engineers and administrators working on self-driving operations in Pittsburgh. Ford invested $1 billion into Argo AI, and ancillary marketshave cropped up around necessary hardware for the cars — manufacturing and distributing the lidar sensors central to computer vision is lucrative in and of itself.
Still, former Grand Challenge entrants recall the dedicated hours necessary in building this ecosystem.
Jason Ziglar, now an employee at Argo AI, recalled the long nights spent working as an infrastructure and perception developer at a test center in the Nevada desert during the second DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005.
As team members rounded out their work for the day and prepared to head back to a hotel an hour away, a few would stick around.
“There was a little garage out there ... whoever was kind of in crunch mode and needed extra time would be out there and work,” Mr. Ziglar said.
One night, two guys stayed behind, he said. When the team returned, they found the men jittery, with watery eyes, sleeping bags in the background.
“After a few minutes, it finally comes out that they were out testing [ on the track] and they were just driving in circles and circles,” he said. “And then the guy in the passenger seat wakes up and looks at the laptop.”
They had both fallen asleep in the self-driving car.
“The standard work pace for people at that point was 40 hours in every two days,” Mr. Ziglar said.
Despite the loss in the second challenge, Mr. Whittaker and his team were not deterred. On Nov. 3, 2007, a 45-member team led Boss to the finish line first, averaging 14 mph throughout a 60mile course.
“To finish first,” Mr. Whittaker said, “you must first finish.”