Bob, meet Alice

“We Went! We Raced! We Ate Barbed Wire!” stated Team Caltech’s unabashedly honest website headline on the performance of the truck “Bob” in last year’s DARPA Grand Challenge road race.

The race from L.A. to Las Vegas called for a completely autonomous vehicle (no driver or remote control) that could travel 142 miles over dirt trails and open desert in 10 hours or less. Bob went about 1.3 miles before getting tangled in barbed wire. The farthest any entry got was 7.4 miles.

Enter “Alice,” the new vehicle from Team Caltech 2005—a group of undergrads, grad students, and faculty advisers—that will compete this year on October 8. “We are light-years ahead with Alice with respect to where we were last year at the same point with Bob,” says project manager Richard Murray, a professor of control and dynamical systems, and the chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. That may explain why Alice sports the license plate, “I 8 Bob.”

The DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge is intended to hasten the research and development of driverless ground vehicles that could be used to transport supplies or soldiers on the front lines. According to Joel Burdick, a professor of mechanical engineering and bioengineering and a technical adviser, the technology may also have future ramifications for automobile design, especially for disabled drivers, and for space exploration.

With a $2 million first prize, the race is open to individuals and organizations. Like last year, the exact route won’t be announced until two hours before the start.

Bob, the 1996 Chevrolet Tahoe SUV used last year, has been replaced by a Ford E-350 van customized by Sportsmobile, a company specializing in 4x4 vehicles. A six-liter diesel engine allows Alice to idle for long periods with low fuel consumption. Special hardware on the bumper and roof holds various sensors that serve as “eyes.” Inside is a complete software lab, including a brain—seven Dell servers in temperature-controlled, shock-resistant housing—and four seats with harnesses that, during off-road testing, strap students down enough to let them use a computer keyboard.

Although the team won’t know officially until this month, presumably Alice passed an important progress check in May by DARPA officials, who will whittle the 100-plus entries to 40. During the officials’ visit to the Santa Anita racetrack parking lot, Alice completed two course runs in about 45 seconds, but crunched a trashcan in its third run and made an unnecessary stop when it “thought” it spied an obstacle. On run four, it reran the first part of the course (including the obstacles from run three) at 15 mph, then demonstrated higher speeds while navigating a field of trashcans. To win the race in less than 10 hours, Murray notes, Alice will need to average 20 mph, but will have to drive as fast as 50 mph at times in order to maintain that average.

“We’ve learned some valuable lessons and have some advantages this year,” says Murray. First, this year’s race won’t be during finals week, as last year’s was. The team also now knows what the actual racecourse will be like, and has made Alice street legal so that it doesn’t have to be hauled on a trailer, as Bob was.

While no one will go out on a limb and predict that Caltech will win, Burdick forecasts that someone will complete this year’s course—”a remarkable evolution of the technology and a testament to the hard work of all the teams.”

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