Watson Lecture--The Bumpy Road of the First Robotic Race

PASADENA, Calif. – We Went! We Raced! We Ate Barbed Wire! So states the unabashedly honest headline on the "Team Caltech" website. It was describing how the California Institute of Technology's autonomous truck fared in the DARPA Grand Challenge desert road race that took place on March 13, 2004.

On Wednesday, March 31, Richard Murray, chair of Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, a professor of mechanical engineering, and one of the faculty advisors for Caltech's entry, will give a talk, "Team Caltech: Racing to Win the DARPA Grand Challenge," that will describe the team members' efforts and the results of the competition. Murray's talk is part of the 2003-04 Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series at Caltech.

The 142-mile race, which was supposed to run from just outside Barstow, CA, to Primm, NV, near Las Vegas, required competing teams to build a vehicle that could operate completely autonomously (no remote control allowed!) and to complete a course that included dirt trails, open desert, water crossings, switchbacks, and lots of obstacles, including, yes, a barbed wire fence, and to do so in 10 hours or less. The exact course was kept secret until two hours before the race started. The latitude and longitude of the route were presented in the form of a set of 2,500 GPS waypoints. The vehicles were required to stay within a corridor that varied in width from 10 meters (32 feet) to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). The winner of the race would have received a grand prize of $1 million.

Caltech's entry, a converted 4X4 Chevy Tahoe truck nicknamed "Bob," finished approximately 1.3 miles of the course, successfully navigating around dozens of sage brush bushes, before veering off course and getting caught by a barbed-wire fence. Alas, no team finished the race. The farthest distance covered by any entry was 7.4 miles.

Caltech undergraduates had been working since spring of 2003 to modify the 1996 Tahoe for this competition, aided by researchers from Caltech, JPL, Northrop Grumman, and other sponsors. Instead of being discouraged, Murray notes, the team is ready to start preparing for Grand Challenge II, tentatively scheduled for next year.

Murray's lecture will take place at 8 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium, near Michigan Avenue south of Del Mar Boulevard, on Caltech's campus in Pasadena. Seating is available on a free, no-ticket-required, first-come, first-served basis. Caltech has offered the Watson Lecture Series since 1922, when it was conceived by the late Caltech physicist Earnest Watson as a way to explain science to the local community.

For more information, call (888) 2CALTECH (888-222-5832) or (626) 395-4652.

Media Contact: Mark Wheeler (626) 395-8733 wheel@caltech.edu

Visit the Caltech Media Relations website at http://pr.caltech.edu/media