They are on their way. It’s the DARPA Grand Challenge. The race is from Barstow to Vegas. The competitors are 25 robots running without human control over the desert ground in between. The prize is one million dollars. Their creators are various academic, civilian and presumably some corporate engineering groups. The purpose it to advance the US military’s capacity to kill people without risking American life.

It’s for real and it’s running right now. DARPA has a beautiful tracking screen that you can watch if your browser has the shockwave plug-in, check it out here: http://www.grandchallenge.org/tracking/

It’s really a wonder of GIS and real-time data integration.

The robots are all pretty amazing. There is everything from repurposed hummers to purpose built dune buggies to tricked out ATVs. As of now the ATV is in the lead.

I was trying not to get sucked into the whole thing. They aren’t hiding the fact that the goal is to develop technology useful to the military. I suspect a lot of the folks involved in building this stuff aren’t particularly interested in the military applications, it’s just too fun for them not to do it. That’s a little unsettling.

But I’ve gotten sucked in. Mostly because one of the competitors is a motorcycle.

my mistake: the robots aren’t rolling yet. I was confused by some ghost data on the tracking screen. They will be on their way tomorrow (march 13th) at 6:00am PST. The race is scheduled to wrap up in one day, but we’ll see.