OS X-powered robot car stalls in race semi-finals

We were all excited when the OS X-powered, unmanned Volkswagen Touareg nicknamed Dora made it to the national semi-finals of the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge race of robot vehicles. Sadly, Dora's run ended last week when it failed to finish the last of the qualifying events for the race finals. Dora's handlers, Team Banzai, blame the failure on their conservative driving strategy which apparently caused Dora to think she was hemmed in by a traffic cone. Team Banzai is probably kicking itself, knowing that it's careful strategy caused it to forfeit a hefty prize of $2 million, which went to a Stanford team.

Dora is a fully autonomous vehicle, meaning that it is not remote-controlled. Inside the car, G5s running OS X controlled the steering, brake, gas pedal, and gear shifts. The race of robot ground vehicles was sponsored by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense -- the same organization involved in pioneering the Internet, Stealth aircraft, and smart bombs.

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Source: http://team.gobanzai.com/

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We were all excited when the OS X-powered, unmanned Volkswagen Touareg nicknamed Dora made it to the national semi-finals of the 2005 DARPA...

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heh. maybe they'll try next year with pentium-M powered MaciNTELs. a bit of a pity though. why didn't they make a "jam on the accelerator" button to override the autonomous control??? that should get them out of any tight spot next year with this feature :D

October 11 2005 at 8:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris

What's a team with the name 'Banzai' doing employing a conservative strategy? (Team Timid maybe?) The failure caused them to forfeit _a_chance_to_try_to_win_ the prize, not the prize itself.

October 11 2005 at 4:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

matth

Sure, it crashed. But it looked way better than the PC powered trucks doing it. It also had the better commercials. Like when Colin Powell explained why he made the switch to OSX powered tanks" "Think different, then think fast or get your tail blown off..."

October 10 2005 at 4:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

wheels

I thought Dora was driven by Mac minis, not G5s. Oh well, at least it didn't crash...

October 10 2005 at 3:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply