Team Jefferson, a Charlottesville-based engineering team that includes University students and faculty and other community members, was eliminated in the Wednesday semi-finals of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Grand Challenge competition that finished yesterday. The event's goal was to pilot an autonomous vehicle through 131.6 miles of the Mojave Desert in less than 10 hours.
A team from Stanford University was awarded $2 million after completing the circuit in less than seven hours. Stanford was one of only five teams to successfully complete the entire course. Team Jefferson's car was beset by a failure in one of the processing chips and hit the wall at 70 miles per hour.
"We spent all day Monday and Tuesday repairing the vehicle, but then we had another trial on Wednesday and we unfortunately did not make it" to the finals, second-year Engineering student Michael Myers said.
Team members expressed disappointment about the way the competition turned out after a year of effort.
"We certainly would've completed the course, given the course they laid out was a lot easier than we thought it would be," said Paul Perrone, team leader and a University alumnus.
Team Jefferson's vehicle, nicknamed "Tommy," is a dune buggy platform with a Subaru legacy engine, Myers said. The vehicle uses sensors to detect obstacles and computers to steer it clear of hazards.
Despite losing the competition, Team Jefferson will continue to use its vehicle.
"We have a functioning vehicle again that we're going to use to showcase and demonstrate what this technology can do," Perrone said.
The Grand Challenge is a government effort to accelerate research and development in autonomous ground vehicles, with the hope of saving the lives of American soldiers on the battlefield, according to the DARPA Web site. The goal of the Defense Department is to create a fleet of autonomous vehicles by 2015.
This will be a difficult but feasible goal to achieve, according to University physics Prof. Michael Fowler.
"Well, obviously some [autonomous vehicles] already exist, but if they have the flexibility to work in Iraq is not clear at all," Fowler said. "The problem might be that they might flip over or they might be easily derailed."
Another potential problem could be refueling the vehicles.
"We know that in real battlefields they'd have to go long distances," Fowler said. "If they run out of fuel in the middle, they're not very useful."
University members embraced the effort. Members of Team Jefferson associated with the University include Myers and Engineering Professors George Cahen, Jr. and Ronald Williams. Michael L. Woosley and Janie Perrone, University alumni, also participated.
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