DARPA Grand Challenge (2007)

The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge, was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base (currently used as Southern California Logistics Airport), in Victorville, California (Google map), in the West of the United States. Discovery's Science channel followed a few of the teams and covered the Urban Challenge in its Robocars series.

The $2 million winner was Tartan Racing, a collaborative effort by Carnegie Mellon University and General Motors Corporation, with their vehicle "Boss", a heavily modified Chevrolet Tahoe. The second-place finisher earning the $1 million prize was the Stanford Racing Team with their entry "Junior", a 2006 Volkswagen Passat. Coming in third place was team Victor Tango from Virginia Tech winning the $500,000 prize with their 2005 Ford Escape hybrid, "Odin".

The course involved a 96 kilometres (60 mi) urban area course, to be completed in less than 6 hours. Rules included obeying all traffic regulations while negotiating with other traffic and obstacles and merging into traffic. While the 2004 and 2005 events were more physically challenging for the vehicles, the robots operated in isolation and did not encounter other vehicles on the course, the Urban Challenge required designers to build vehicles able to obey all traffic laws while they detect and avoid other vehicles on the course. Both other competing robots and human professional drivers occupied the course. This is a particular challenge for vehicle software, as vehicles must make "intelligent" decisions in real time based on the actions of other vehicles. Other than previous autonomous vehicle efforts that focused on structured situations such as highway driving with little interaction between the vehicles, this competition operated in a more cluttered urban environment and required the cars to perform sophisticated interactions with each other, such as maintaining precedence at a 4-way stop intersection.

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