Virginia Tech's entrant in the DARPA Urban Challenge Robot car race completed the second of two required primary missions at about 11:45, and headed out five minutes later for the last mission required to win the race.
Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing and the Stanford Racing team were close behind. At 12:05, both vehicles pulled back into their start positions to begin their third and final missions.
The cars all started the race a few minutes apart, and they have different missions requiring varying lengths of time to complete. That's so the cars don't crowd each other at the start and finish points. It means, however that the times at which the cars come back in after completing missions doesn't necessarily reflect how close they are to winning.
Still, it's safe to say the event is shaping up into quite a horse race, especially now that the bumblers have been taken off the course.
A total of 5 cars have been cut from the race. The latest to be dropped is CarOLO's VW Passat, which blew its second chance to continue competition after nearly colliding head-on with MIT's vehicle in a traffic circle. Judges allowed CarOLO team members to reposition the vehicle and continue the race after the first near-accident, but they pulled the car from the race after it blocked MIT again.
