Autonomy. Lawrence Burns
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desert road. From somewhere in the distance, a rocket blazes into the picture, collides with the SUV and obliterates the vehicle in a blast of dust and metal.
The footage of the successful deployment of a laser-guided bomb was captured by a camera-equipped drone aircraft. The drones flew above the conflicts to provide imagery of the Iraqi and Afghan territories. Drones were searching Afghanistan for Al-Qaeda hideouts that might shelter Osama bin Laden. They were scanning Iraq for nests of Ba’athist loyalists.
If the U.S. military could use drones to obtain imagery of places so hostile and remote, Urmson thought, then such imagery would soon be available for the entire world. And perhaps, Urmson reasoned, that same type of imagery could be used to simplify the robot’s task. They weren’t able to use LIDAR to scan the race course in advance, because no one on Red Team knew where the race course was, but they did know the race went across the Mojave Desert—and maps existed of that, didn’t they? In fact, portraits of the Mojave had already been built by entities like the U.S. Geological Survey and the military.
“We realized we didn’t have to do SLAM,” Urmson recalled. “Because it was becoming clear there would be a global database [of maps] available … So why not use them?”
If Red Team members could give Sandstorm an accurate map of its surroundings before the race, they could remove a time-intensive step from the computational task. The new approach reframed the challenge. The team had assumed they were trying to build a robot that could sense the world so well, it could discern a road in the desert and navigate it safely for 150 miles. Using maps meant the robot could be told in advance where the road was, and how to drive it. The method had the potential to allow Sandstorm to travel much faster than it otherwise might.
But first, Red Team’s undergraduates, pauper grad students and volunteers would have to build the most detailed map of the Mojave Desert ever assembled. It was an enormous task, but Red Whittaker’s students were accustomed to achieving enormous tasks. A portion of the team set to procuring high-res maps of the whole of the Mojave Desert, a relatively simple matter, given Whittaker’s and Spencer Spiker’s defense contacts. Now the team set about using the maps to plot routes through the Mojave. They also dispatched two engineers, Tugrul Galatali and Josh Anhalt, to drive as many roads in the Mojave Desert as possible in a rented SUV with video cameras sticking out the windows, capturing imagery from the ground in what amounted to an early, rudimentary execution of Google’s Street View idea.
The next step saw the Carnegie Mellon mapping team comparing the footage and the map to assign each area with a value—what they called a cost. So a ridge or a cliff that would wreck Sandstorm if the robot went over it would get a cost of infinity. A smooth road or a dry, flat lake bed likely would have a cost of zero. Sandstorm’s computers then were programmed to direct the robot to drive the route with the lowest cost.
One evening, with just weeks to go before race date, the senior members of Red Team met in the loft of Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics building. “We were making some progress, trying to map every trail in that whole desert,” Urmson recalls. But at some point during this meeting in the loft, Urmson realized their work wasn’t happening quickly enough. “It became clear we weren’t going to get there,” he said. Too many different potential routes existed. By the time the race date arrived, they would have mapped out only a small portion of the possible routes.
That was the point that Red Team came to its second epiphany. To reduce the possibility of exactly this sort of advance route planning, DARPA had told the teams that its staff would wait to disclose the precise course until just two hours before the start—at 4:30 A.M. the morning of the race. Red Team was getting good at creating routes through the desert. So what if they changed strategies? What if, rather than focusing on creating a map that featured a pre-driven route along every single conceivable trail through the desert, they instead became really good, and blindingly fast, at teaching Sandstorm to drive a single trail?
Rather than a perfect map, they thought, why didn’t they focus on creating a single, perfect route? One they could plan out in the two-hour span between the time DARPA disclosed the approximate course and the start of the race? The old way involved using the maps and the route planners during the months before the race to effectively pre-drive every single road through a desert that covered a territory of fifty thousand square miles. This new way involved focusing on a single 150-mile path that the planning team would examine in fine detail—and doing it in the 120 minutes that passed after DARPA disclosed the race route.
From that moment on, one part of Red Team focused on executing the second epiphany. In the old high bay in the Planetary Robotics building, about a dozen members rehearsed exactly what would happen after DARPA handed over the route in a computer file at 4:30 A.M. The file would feature a series of about 2,500 GPS waypoints, which everyone referred to as “breadcrumbs,” spaced about a hundred yards away from one another, tracing out the course in a dot-to-dot fashion. The dozen members of Red Team’s planning unit would leap into action. One would feed the file into a software program that used the Mojave map’s cost estimates to build a more precise route, with many times more breadcrumbs than DARPA’s route network definition file (RNDF).
But Urmson, Whittaker and their team didn’t trust the route calculated by the planning software. It had been known to send Sandstorm on journeys that went over ridges, into ditches or through wire fences. So a team of editors would divide up the course into sections and then, using computers, virtually go over every yard of the computer-calculated race path to make sure the software hadn’t made any mistakes. Once the human editors were done correcting the course, they’d reassemble it into a single route and upload it to Sandstorm, to execute on the race course.
Still, by January 2004, just two months before race date, Sandstorm had not yet gone fifty miles on its own. One thing causing Whittaker and Urmson anxiety was the disconnect between where they were testing Sandstorm and the race course. They were testing the robot on the frigid shores of Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River. The race would be held in the Mojave Desert. Would the change in environment pose a problem to Sandstorm?
In February, Whittaker arranged for some of the team’s key members, including Urmson, Peterson and Spiker, to accompany Sandstorm to the Mojave Desert to refine the robot’s capabilities. (Sandstorm actually made the trip in a fifty-two-foot enclosed semi-trailer.) The final part of preparations would happen at the Nevada Automotive Test Center, an enormous swathe of desert where companies from all parts of the automotive sector, from tire manufacturers to transmission firms, tested their products in the harshest desert terrain available.
In Nevada, Urmson’s team worked exclusively on Sandstorm. Write code, take Sandstorm out to test the code, watch for mistakes, take note of the mistakes, write code. They repeated the cycle without regard to clocks or arbitrary separations of day and night. Two, three days at a time they worked without sleeping, fueled by Mountain Dew, Red Bull and junk food, and then, when they were too exhausted to manage to keep themselves vertical, they slept. Sometimes in an RV they’d rented, although the trailer didn’t have enough beds for all of them; others slept on the floor of the test center’s mechanics shop on folding lawn chairs, or in the reclined seats of the SUVs they rented to tail Sandstorm.
Working nonstop, through night, through day, the way they did presented some difficulties. One evening, past midnight, Sandstorm ran into a fence post, wrecking the front bumper, which was necessary to support cameras and radar sensors. The test center’s mechanics building was locked up, of course, but in the spirit of asking for forgiveness being easier than requesting advance permission, Spiker and one of the students scaled the fence and broke into the building, where they welded together an entirely new bumper with thick steel pipe. The thing ended up weighing about two hundred pounds—making it more than able to support the sensing equipment the robot required. “You could probably have driven through a building and not hurt that thing,” Spiker recalls.
One thing they didn’t do much of was bathe. The wastewater tank in their rented RV filled up, and by the time they got around to driving it to the nearest town to empty it, the vibrations from the washboard dirt road into town splashed sewage all over the RV’s interior. Cleaning the mess was so traumatizing that the team outlawed use of the RV’s bathroom. While there