MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Junior, the robot Volkswagen, passed its basic driver’s test here Thursday.Now comes the hard part: a race on mock city streets that will raise the bar for artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot here next to Google headquarters to test Stanford University’s autonomous passenger car, Junior, in what was its first big qualifying test for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA’s third Grand Challenge competition for driverless vehicles.

DARPA will make so-called “site visits” this summer to evaluate all 53 prospective Urban Challenge contestants, homing in on whether the robots can perform basic driving skills, including navigating a four-way stop with live traffic, passing a stationary car and executing a U-turn.

“It’s a steep ladder to get up to the Urban Challenge. What you saw today was the first rung of the ladder,” Norm Whitaker, program manager for DARPA, said to a crowd of people following a two-and-a-half-hour test of Stanford Racing Team’s Junior.

Read the full article:

• Stanford robot passes driving test | CNET News.com

Related posts:

1. Urban Challenge prizes finalized
2. Droid satellites tested at ISS
3. Bringing life to Pleo

December 8, 2006. DARPA Finalizes 2007 Urban Challenge Cash Prize Levels Top Three Finishers to Receive $2 Million, $1 Million and $500,000 Prizes The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will give $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 awards to the top three finishers that complete the course within the sixhour time limit in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge for autonomous robotic ground vehicles, competition organizers announced today.

DARPA’s original cash prize authority for the first two Grand Challenges expired with the passage of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007. DARPA had planned to award trophies to the top three finishers in the Urban Challenge, but Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Kenneth J. Krieg approved $2 million, $1 million, and $500,000 cash prizes for the first, second and third teams to complete the Urban Challenge’s 60 miles within six hours.

• Darpa Grand Challenge

Related posts:

1. Junior ready for Urban Challenge
2. RoboCup 2007
3. Bringing life to Pleo

“DARPA is now developing a new breed of satellites that can be precision-maneuvered in unison and easily perform advanced operations with built-in sensors, computers and thrusters. From the article: ‘David Miller, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Space Systems Laboratory, says such satellites might be used for such tasks as building giant space telescopes and closely monitoring Earth. The shuttle Discovery last week delivered the second of three satellite test “droids” that are undergoing experiments at the International Space Station.’”

• Slashdot.org: DARPA Developing ‘Droid’ Satellites

Related posts:

1. Dextre the Space Janitor
2. Urban Challenge prizes finalized
3. Robonaut 2 (R2) refuses to work