History & approaches
The DARPA Grand Challenge: the big bang of self-driving
The DARPA Grand Challenge was a series of US government prize races, held in 2004, 2005, and 2007, that asked robotic vehicles to drive themselves with no human aboard. Widely seen as the big bang of the modern self-driving car, it produced the people and ideas behind nearly every major program that followed.
What it was
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, is the research arm of the US military. To jump-start autonomous vehicle technology, it offered cash prizes to any team whose vehicle could finish a course entirely on its own. The races turned a quiet research topic into a public, competitive sport and drew university and industry teams from around the world.
The three races
The leap from zero finishers in 2004, to a clean desert win in 2005, to cars obeying traffic laws in a mock city in 2007, compressed years of progress into a handful of seasons.
| Year | Race | Course | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Grand Challenge | 142 miles, Mojave Desert | No team finished. The best car covered about 7 miles. No prize awarded. |
| 2005 | Grand Challenge | ~132 miles, Nevada desert | Stanford's car Stanley, led by Sebastian Thrun, won the $2 million prize. |
| 2007 | Urban Challenge | ~60 miles in a mock city, with live traffic | Carnegie Mellon's car Boss, with Chris Urmson as technical director, took first place. |
Why it was the big bang
The challenge did more than prove the technology was possible. It assembled the founding generation of the industry. Sebastian Thrun went on to start Google's self-driving car project. Chris Urmson led that project's engineering and later co-founded Aurora. Alumni of these teams seeded Waymo, Cruise, Uber's program, and many others.
Lawrence D. Burns, the former General Motors head of research and development and a longtime adviser to Google's self-driving project, opens his insider history Autonomy at the 2004 desert race, treating it as the starting line of the modern driverless era. Burns spoke to the Self Driving Cars 101 Detroit group on May 26, 2021, in a talk titled Perfecting the Autonomous Vehicle: Its History and the Road Ahead.
Watch
Frequently asked
- What was the DARPA Grand Challenge?
- A series of US government prize races in 2004, 2005, and 2007 that challenged vehicles to drive a course with no human aboard. It is widely credited with kick-starting the modern self-driving car industry.
- Who won the DARPA Grand Challenge?
- No one finished the 2004 race. In 2005, Stanford's Stanley, led by Sebastian Thrun, won. In the 2007 Urban Challenge, Carnegie Mellon's Boss, with Chris Urmson as technical director, won.
- Why does the DARPA Challenge still matter?
- The engineers who competed went on to found or lead almost every major self-driving program, including Google's project, now Waymo. The races proved the idea was real and built the field's founding talent.
- Who is Lawrence Burns?
- A former corporate vice president of research and development at General Motors and an adviser to Google's self-driving project since 2011. His book Autonomy chronicles the field from the DARPA races onward. He spoke to the Self Driving Cars 101 Detroit group on May 26, 2021.