As part of the application process for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, teams had to create a short video that demonstrated that they have a vehicle that has some chance of success, or at least will put on a good show. DARPA uses the video to determine which teams will receive an in-person site visit for further evaluation. The best 40 teams as determined by site visits will become semi-finalists for the qualification event.
Axion Racing's video, featuring the Axion racing twins that you may remember from last year, is hilarious. Watch the Axion twins as they blow kisses to the director of DARPA (“Hi Tony!!”), and mispronounce words like "autonomous", "calibrate", "electronical" and "unit".
CMU's Red Team Too has a video that pretty much begs you to hate them. Or maybe the guy doing the voiceover was trying to be sarcastically pompous and arrogant.
Several more videos are available on this page created by Team CIMAR. All seem to feature AWESOME soundtracks.
Posted by jjwiseman at March 08, 2005 10:32 AMI am having my recurring fantasy that the first team to win the DARPA challenge will be a bunch of slovenly monkeywrencher-culturejammer-technonerds who show up with something akin to the National Lampoon Deathmobile, built from scrap metal and shopping carts, controlled by about a hundred lines of organic behavior code run on a hacked XBOX, and financed entirely by Paypal donations.
It would win the challenge with flying colors but be entirely non-practical, non-reproducible, and non-marketable.
Posted by: TensegrityDan on March 8, 2005 12:07 PMI wish I could mispronounce "unit." Seriously how?
Posted by: bondowine on March 8, 2005 12:19 PMAgreed -- this competition is exciting from a purely technical standpoint, however as soon as I consider the obvious military applications my interest pretty much evaporates... pooft!
Posted by: enki on March 8, 2005 03:22 PM