Self-driving car veers off course

Prospect 11's improbable ride came to an end Saturday morning near Primm, Nev., as the student-engineered robotic vehicle malfunctioned 10 miles into a 132-mile driverless race across the Mojave Desert.

The finals of the Grand Challenge competition — created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to accelerate research in unmanned ground vehicles for use on the battlefield — pitted 23 completely autonomous cars against each other, the clock and desert conditions in a race for $2 million.

Stanley, a Volkswagen SUV modified by a Stanford team in collaboration with area companies, traversed the terrain in less than seven hours to earn its creators the grand prize. Four other vehicles — two Humvees from Carnegie Mellon and a sentimental favorite from Louisiana that lost a week of construction to Hurricane Katrina — also completed the course.

Prospect 11, a silver GMC Canyon truck designed by a group of Princeton engineering students, was operating flawlessly until a problem with the vehicle's memory caused it to bog down near an overpass on the desert course, ORFE professor and Prospect 11 adviser Alain Kornhauser said.

"We're of course disappointed that's [how far] it went," Kornhauser said. "And we're extremely disappointed that it's something we should have found."

Brendan Collins '08, one of the vehicle's engineers, echoed Kornhauser's frustration. "I was disappointed that a rather silly glitch took us down, because we didn't really get to show off the car's performance in more challenging sections of the course," he said in an email.

Prior to the final competition Saturday in Nevada, Kornhauser and eight members of the Prospect 11 team had spent a week in Fontana, Calif., competing against 42 other teams in the DARPA National Qualification Event. Those vehicles were selected from among 195 entrants through a series of qualifying events and in-person site visits during the past six months.

For its first Grand Challenge competition in 2004, DARPA offered a $1 million prize to the team whose vehicle could complete the course the fastest, but no vehicle made it farther than eight miles along the 142-mile route.

Though Prospect 11 didn't travel as far as team members hoped, it still bested last year's record, Kornhauser said.

"Look, the [10 miles] was further than anyone went the last time it was run," he said. "Our objective was to have the students learn and to really complement their academic experience at Princeton, and we accomplished that in spades."

Though this year's competition is over, the Prospect 11 team — which includes Collins, Gordon Franken '08, Scott Schiffres '06, Bryan Cattle '07, Anand Atreya '07, Kamil Choudhury '06, Andrew Saxe '08 and Josh Herbach '08 — will continue to make improvements on the vehicle, Collins said.

"We have a lot of ideas bouncing around," he said. "For my part, I'm going to continue to work on stereo vision. We saw a lot of interest in the technology out there, and I'm looking forward to testing out a few ideas."

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Collins, who spent the majority of his summer working with six other Prospect 11 members on the truck, said that the DAPRA experience has proven academically beneficial.

"We've all learned immeasurably from this project," he said. "Every day we had to learn more about engineering as we grappled with real problems in the field. I couldn't have imagined a more worthwhile way to spend my summer."