PRIMM, Nevada -- The first of 23 driverless robotic vehicles rolled across the Mojave Desert at dawn Saturday in a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored robot race across 132 miles of rugged desert and mountains.
Bolting first out of the gate this year was a customized red Hummer built by Carnegie Mellon University, which took off at a brisk pace, disappearing into the desert at 20 mph while blaring its fire sirens. Two weeks ago, the team got a scare when the vehicle, dubbed H1ghlander, rolled over on its roof during practice after hitting a rock.
Trailing H1ghlander was Stanford University's Volkswagen SUV, which completed four flawless laps around the California Speedway during a qualifying trial last week.
Carnegie Mellon's other entry, a military Humvee called Sandstorm, ran third. Sandstorm was the best performer in last year's robot race despite traveling only 7 1/2 miles.
No one won that competition. The much-hyped robot race ended without a winner when all the self-navigating vehicles broke down shortly after leaving the starting gate.
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, made the course harder this year and doubled the taxpayer-funded prize to spur innovation and development of remote control-free robots that could be used in the battlefield.
The unmanned vehicles, ranging from a military Humvee to a behemoth six-wheel truck, must use their computer brains and sensing devices to follow a programmed route and avoid hitting obstacles that may doom their chances.
Early Saturday, teams were given a CD-ROM with GPS coordinates that chart the exact route. The race, which starts and ends in the casino town of Primm, spans the Mojave Desert on the Nevada side.
Vehicles have to drive on rough, winding desert roads and dry lake beds filled with overhanging brush and man-made obstacles. The machines also must traverse a narrow 1.3-mile mountain pass with a steep drop-off and go through three tunnels designed to knock out their GPS signals.
The robots will bolt from the starting gate at staggered times followed by a chase car.
Vehicles must average 15 to 20 mph to finish in time. To qualify, vehicles competed in a weeklong trial at the California Speedway outside of Los Angeles where they had to zip through a 2.5-mile bumpy track littered with hay bales, traffic cones and junk cars. All 23 finalists completed the course at least once.
This year's field was more competitive. Even before Saturday's race, many teams tested their vehicles in parts of the Southwest desert under race-like conditions including some that practiced on last year's course from Barstow, California, to Primm.
The vehicles were tricked out with the latest sensors, lasers, cameras and radar that feed information to several onboard computers. This, in turn, helps vehicles make intelligent decisions such as distinguishing a dangerous boulder from a tumbleweed and calculating whether a chasm is too deep to cross.
To ensure safety, a judge in the chase vehicle could pause a robot during the race, stopping the 10-hour clock without penalty. The judge also could press a kill switch if the robot was headed toward danger, ending its chances of winning.
The so-called Grand Challenge race is part of the Pentagon's effort to cut the risk of casualties by fulfilling a congressional mandate to have a third of all military ground vehicles unmanned by 2015.
The military currently has a small fleet of autonomous ground vehicles stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the machines are remotely controlled by a soldier who usually rides in the same convoy. The Pentagon wants to eliminate the human factor and use self-thinking robotic vehicles to ferry supplies in war zones.
