At sunrise on Saturday, March 13, a new type of race will begin. The only rule: drivers need not apply. Robots, on the other hand, are more than welcome to participate. DARPA’s Grand Challenge, now almost two years in the making, is a race for autonomous vehicles across the Mojave Desert from near Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV. At least half of the 250 mile course will be off road—the official website for the race claims such inclusions as barditches, underpasses, water hazards, and washboards. All of these hazards must be autonomously navigated without the least bit of human intervention, in fact, the teams can go nowhere near their respective vehicles during the race. They don’t even press go at the start line. The prize for being the first to Vegas (in under 10 hours, mind you)? How about $1,000,000 USD – congressionally approved.

Over 100 teams initially applied to race, and 84 submitted timely and complete technical reports about their vehicles by the deadline early last year. Of these 84, DARPA deemed only 19 as “complete and technically sound” based on reviews of progress taken late last year.

Entries into the race include a modified military surplus hummer, a riderless motorcycle, a state-of-the-art military transport truck, a beefed-up dune buggy, as well as a good combination of consumer SUVs and 4WD Pickups.

The Hummer, by Carnegie Mellon University, was looking like the front runner until they rolled it a few days ago. They are fast on the road to recovery, but they lost a few very important days of testing before the race, so we’ll see how they do. My guess is that they’ll roll it again sometime during the 200+ miles of desert racing. The links above represent what I see as the most competitive of the entries, minus the motorcycle. As cool as it is, I don’t think it has a chance. Driving around a grassy field in Berkley is one thing, driving on off-road trails in the Mojave is entirely another. Either way, we’ll find out on Saturday, although I wouldn’t expect live race coverage or anything. The hard-core nerds in the audience could only wish (including myself).