[K1NGWARREN]

Robot race ends without a winner
Sunday, March 14, 2004

BARSTOW, California (AP) -- A $1 million race across the Mojave Desert by driverless robots ended Saturday after all 15 entries either broke down or withdrew, a race official said.

Two of the entries covered about seven miles of the roughly 150-mile course while eight failed to make it to the one-mile mark. Others crashed seconds after starting.

The race ended just before 11 a.m. after the final four competitors were disabled, said Col. Jose Negron, race program manager.

Competitors suffered a variety of problems that included stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment.


http://edition.cnn.c...e.ap/index.html

[Chefelf]

Wow, EVERYONE has been making such a big deal about this race. I say "everyone" but I only really mean my two main forms of information: Tech TV and Wired Magazine.

[srmoore]

I was saddened because Team Red is from my school.. and I worked with some of them. Really they won though because they were the only one to qualify before they re-wrote the rules, and they had made runs of over 150 miles... so sad that they had an engine failure.

[Reader]

Robot1: "Why are we racing eachother?"
Robot2" "yes... we could be controlling the humans"

They transform and start terrorizing citizens.

[barend]

what the hell happened???

did some kid accidentally fly into the droid controll ship and destroy it?

[jyd]

haha very good, maybe one of the droids had a hearing problem and couldnt hear his commanding officer droid's voice commands (i laughed just typing that it is such a stupid concept)

[sinister grinner]

okay, did the people test their robots first. or was it just plain bad luck.

if it wasnt for bad luck, i wouldnt have no luck at all.

[barend]

or double negatives...

[srmoore]

Well I know that the CMU robot had done runs of over 120 miles at about 40Mph..

The two that got the furthest hit a particularly chalenageing part of the race with a bunch of switch backs. The CMU robot had been pulling to the left ever since it flipped earlier in the week when a sensor went flaky, so it drifted off the road and guy stuck.. the other robot that almost went as far as the CMU bot went compleatly off the road and fell into a ravine.

So yeah they did test them.. but this course was unusally difficult, and there was some bad luck thrown in. Although there were some robots that just shouldn't have been running in the first place since they failed miserably during the qualification stage. But since only CMU robot qualified, they re-wrote the rules to allow 15 robots to race.