When the sandstorm turned the first corner and began to disappear into the open desert, its laser scanner detected a clear path ahead, and its detailed map data said it was time to touch the accelerator. The wheels of the sandstorm spun, expelled the dust and carried it over 30 mph.
For Chris Urmson and his teammates, the moment resonated. This was the first time they had left the robot out of sight and out of control. They couldn’t do anything else. No more tests, no more solutions. Sandstorm will complete the route or not. And his first big test was a few miles ahead. The trick to getting up and overcoming Daggett Ridge was to master the setbacks, the forks became so narrow that if you just followed a GPS path you could easily send a vehicle falling off the road and hundreds of feet down. So could a misaligned sensor or any software problem. However, if you could remove this obstacle, you would return to flat terrain and mostly clear roads, with almost smooth navigation to Primm.
Over the next 20 minutes, three more vehicles came out the door following the Sandstorm trail. It looked like Tether would get a proper race, even after some very unstable displays in the qualifying round. Then the problems began.
Sixth, Axion Racing, a group of friends from San Diego, funded by an investor from a company that imported bottled water from Micronesia. During the previous year, Melanie Dumas, an engineer who had canceled the Great Challenge as impossible and not worth trying, had seen her skepticism and reluctance turn into optimism.
He had seen his team’s Jeep drive on this type of terrain and drive well. He even thought that, with a little luck, he could overcome Carnegie Mellon’s sandstorm. When the flag waved, the Jeep came out of the canal and made the first turn smoothly. But as he approached the first narrow door, he turned again. The whole route. There was no obvious reason for the rough face. Perhaps the sensors had considered the aperture too narrow. Maybe something else had acted. It didn’t matter. As the Jeep returned to the starting line, sending its chase vehicle back as a linebacker, Darpa managed to reach its emergency closure. Axion’s big challenge ended in a matter of seconds. Dumas was devastated.
Next up was the University of Louisiana six-wheeled Cajunbot. He hit a wall at the exit of the gutter, leaving himself out of containment. She was followed by the Ensco bathtub with a boat. As the flag waved, it froze for a few seconds, rolled forward, stopped, and started again. He drifted to the left, where the side of the road leaned up, leaning to one side before returning to flat ground. Then it was left again, this time too far away. He turned and landed beside him, 1,000 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 fix their vehicle’s steering controls. At the last minute, they decided on a solution that they hoped would work, with no time to test it. His prayer went unanswered. His entry, Doom Buggy, was never turned around. It unfolded in a straight line and, after 50 yards, collided with a concrete barrier.
SciAutonics I, run by an engineer who had worked in Germany’s autonomous driving efforts in the 1980s, saw his SUV get out of the way never to return. (The SciAutononics II did about seven miles before getting trapped in an embankment.) The University of Florida Summit swerved about half a mile and became entangled in a wire fence. Terramax, the 14-ton lime-green, six-wheeled military truck, traveled 1.2 kilometers before getting stuck in a pair of small bushes that its sensors confuse with immovable obstacles. Tired of seeing her come and go like a driver trying to escape an impossible parallel parking space, Tony Tether ordered death.