The autonomous robotics race I talked about last week took place yesterday. Sixteen teams actually qualified to run, with the team from Cargengie Mellon University the decided frontrunner. CNU’s Red Team, which has invested over a year of work and almost half a million dollars into their modified military surplus Hummer, made it a whopping 7 miles of the 160 mile course. One of the other teams outpaced them by about a quarter of a mile. Those were the best finishes. By 11AM, teams were packing up and heading home. The one high-school team’s entry didn’t even make the first corner. One of the entries was shut down after driving in circles around the starting area. Another ran through a fence and couldn’t find it’s way back.

I probably sound like I’m being pretty harsh, and I’m not trying to be. The fact is, this is a pretty difficult engineering problem. It may well be one of the most difficult out there. But to have 85 teams enter, 16 actually qualify, and the frontrunners to only travel less than one-twentieth of the course? I’m dissapointed more than anything. I hoped for more. It looks like the next chance will be in 2006, when DARPA is planning on trying again. We’ll see where I sit in the next couple of years, but I may just take my criticism to the races.