One of my clients is Axion Racing, a team that entered the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge is a government sponsored competition with a $1 million prize going to the team who can successfully get an unmanned, fully-autonomous vehicle from Barstow to Las Vegas over rough terrain. Yes, a fully-autonomous vehicle. No driver. No remote control. Just radar, GPS, GIS data, and a lot of luck.
I have an email in to the CEO of the team to find out what happened but from the press reports it seems that the best any vehicle was able to manage was 7 miles before failure. I’ll provide an update when I hear back from the team.
UPDATE: Just got an email from the CEO of Axion Racing and it seems that his team was disqualified due to a last minute code change which required a system reboot.