As Sandstorm turned the first corner and began to disappear into the open desert, its laser scanner detected a clear path ahead, and detailed map data said it was time to hit the throttle. The wheels of the sandstorm spun, picked up the dust and carried it at more than 30 mph.
For Chris Urmson and his colleagues, the moment resonated. This was the first time they had left their robot out of sight and out of control. There was nothing they could do. No more testing, no more fixing. Sandstorm would complete the course or not. And his first big test was just a few miles ahead. The trick to getting up and crossing Daggett Ridge was to master the changes, the hairpin turns so tightly that following a GPS track alone could easily send a vehicle crashing down the path and hundreds of feet down . The same could be a misaligned sensor or any number of software errors. However, if you managed to remove this obstacle, it returned to flat ground and mostly on clean roads, sailing almost smoothly to Primm.
Within the next 20 minutes, three more vehicles left the gate, following in the footsteps of Sandstorm. It looked like Tether was going to get a proper race, even after a few very shaky shows in the qualifying round. Then the problems began.
Sixth in line was Axion Racing, a group of friends in San Diego, funded by an investor in a company that imports bottled water from Micronesia. The previous year, software leader Melanie Dumas, an engineer who had canceled the big challenge as impossible and not worth trying, had seen his skepticism and reluctance turn into optimism.
He had seen his team’s Jeep driving on this type of terrain and driving well. She even thought that, with a little luck, she could overcome Carnegie Mellon’s sandstorm. When the flag fluttered, the Jeep came out of the gutter and made the first smooth turn. But as he approached the first narrow gate, he turned again. Always. There was no obvious reason for this. Perhaps the sensors considered the opening too narrow. Maybe something else would have worked. It didn’t matter. As Jeep headed for the starting line, sending his tracking vehicle back as a backbacker, Darpa hit the emergency stop. Axion’s Great Challenge ended in seconds. Dumas was devastated.
Next up was the University of Louisiana’s six-wheeled Cajunbot. He hit a wall at the exit of the gutter, getting out of the dispute. It was followed by the Ensco tub of a muzzle. As the flag fluttered, froze for a few seconds, it rolled forward, stopped, then began again. He drifted to the left, where the side of the road leaned up, leaning to one side before turning back onto flat ground. Then he went left again, this time too far. It overturned and landed on one side, at 1000 feet, in a course of 142 miles. The whole race lasted 1 minute and 6 seconds.
A group of students from Palos Verdes High School had spent the night before the race struggling to repair the steering controls for their vehicle. At the last minute, they settled on a solution they hoped would work, with no time to test it. Their prayer went unanswered. Their entrance, Doom Buggy, did not return at all. It ran in a straight line and, after 50 meters, hit a concrete barrier.
SciAutonics I, driven by an engineer who worked on Germany’s autonomous driving efforts in the 1980s, saw his ATV wander down the path to never return. (SciAutononics II traveled about seven miles before being stranded on an embankment.) Cimar University in Florida was half a mile away and tangled in a wire fence. Terramax, the 14-ton, lime-green, six-wheeled military truck drove 1.2 miles before getting stuck between a pair of small bushes that its sensors confuse with motionless obstacles. Tired of watching him move back and forth like a driver trying to escape a parallel parking space impossible to squeeze, Tony Tether ordered the murder.