DARPA Grand Challenge (2004)

Announced in 2002, the first DARPA Grand Challenge was a driverless car competition held on March 13, 2004 in the Mojave Desert region of the United States. The 150 miles (240 km) route followed Interstate 15 from just before Barstow, California to just past the California-Nevada border in Primm. None of the robot vehicles finished the route. The vehicle of Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team traveled the farthest distance, completing 11.78 km (7.32 mi) of the course. The $1 million prize remained unclaimed.

Prior to the main event in the Mojave Desert, the twenty-one qualifying teams were required to navigate a mile-long obstacle course at California Speedway. Seven teams were able to successfully complete the entire course, while eight others completed enough of it to satisfy of the judges, resulting in fifteen vehicles in the final race.

Unfortunately, the failures during the preliminary tests were indicative of how the vehicles would perform on the actual course. Two of the fifteen vehicles had to be withdrawn before the final race began and one car flipped upside down in the starting area and had to be withdrawn. Three hours into the event that was scheduled to last ten hours, only four vehicles remained operational. The vehicles suffered from a variety of mechanical problems, including "stuck brakes, broken axles, rollovers, and malfunctioning satellite navigation equipment."

Within a few hours, all of the vehicles in the challenge had suffered critical vehicle failures, had been disqualified, or had withdrawn. The farthest any of the teams got was the Red Team's 7.4 miles (11.9 km), less than 5% off the full length of the course. Their vehicle, Sandstorm, went off-course in a hairpin turn and got stuck on the embankment. The next farthest vehicles were those of the SciAutonics II Team, which traversed 6.7 miles (10.8 km) before becoming stuck on an embankment; Team DAD (Digital Auto Drive), which drove 6.0 miles (9.7 km) before getting stuck on a rock; and the Golem Group, which made it 5.2 miles (8.4 km) before becoming trapped on a steep hill.

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