And the winner is...
Within
the vehicles, the technology is cutting-edge, as you'll see from our
overview of the cars that took first and second place.
Boss is the hugely-appropriate name given to the winning entry put up by Tartan Racing, from Carnegie Mellon University
Along
with Intel, General Motors was a main sponsor of Boss. That's because
the company reckons that its customers will benefit directly from some
of the technology being developed for the competition. Likewise its
shareholders, presumably.
As a for-instance, GM is
expecting in the foreseeable future to be able to offer cars with
automatic parking systems – under the banner Virtual Valet. These automatically guide cars into small spaces without causing bumps and scrapes.
The
company also hopes that its work on unmanned vehicles will help it meet
new safety regulations that come into force in 2011 and require every
new car sold in the USA to be equipped with ESC (Electronic Stability
Control) – what we in Europe would call ESP (Electronic Stability
Programme).
These systems are intended to keep cars on
the road when drivers lose control in slippery conditions or going
round bends too fast.
Teams are rather coy and don't give away too much information about their vehicles and the systems they use but
Tartan Racing's software lead Bryan Salesky did provide some clues.
From
those – and from a little background research – we've come to the
conclusion that Boss likely contains ten Intel T7400 mobile 2.16GHz
CPUs and uses around 90 per cent of the CPU-power available to it.
Seemingly,
too, little has been carried over from the car that the team ran in
2005. Even so, there's not a great deal of hardware
redundancy, although there are some backup sensors. In addition,
software processes are monitored and restarted if they fail to respond
or have crashed.
What's also a little surprising is that the
car's reaction and response times aren't measured in milliseconds but
fractions of a second.
According to Bryan, Boss takes around
one-tenth of a second to react to an obstacle or possible collision and
take avoiding action.
The weather where
the race was held is usually good, so the cars weren't running in the
sort of conditions they might meet elsewhere in the USA or many other
parts of the world where battles might take place.
However, according to Bryan, Boss has
been tested in fog, snow and rain and does finds its way safely in such
adverse conditions.
The rules of the competition don't allow
cars to be remotely controlled in any way – they're working on their own
– but they all have to have wireless emergency stop systems that can be
activated by the control car that follows each vehicle. These have a
range of up to 75m and use 1GHz technology.
Fancy building
your own entrant for the next race? We asked Bryan what the rough cost
would be to modify a standard showroom model up to the specs that Boss
boasts and his estimate was close to three-quarters of a million
dollars!
But, of course, if you take first or even second place, you'll be ahead on the game – though that's rather a big if and doesn't take any account of the massive cost of developing all the necessary proprietary software required!