darpa

Your nitro-fueled R/C racer may look all badass and be really fast, but it's got its limitations. Namely, walls. The Sand Flea robot shown above, developed by Boston Dynamics, won't win any races or beauty contests, but it laughs at walls. More precisely, it just leaps over them. The little bot, ...

Typically when the Pentagon puts out a tender for a new contract, it goes to to established defense contractors. Not so with the new XC2V FlypMode combat vehicle. This time, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) crowd-sourced the project, meaning that it opened up the contract to ...

Local Motors is all about reaching out to the crowd and sourcing the best ideas as a team. It did just that in a new design contest, in which readers were tasked with developing a vehicle for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) XC2V Challenge. That stands for Experimental ...

The obvious glib commentary here would invoke Optimus Prime, or something. Instead, we're going to digress momentarily and say that the best kind of transformer involves an LP record and an SL1200. Either way, DARPA has its own transforming going on. The Pentagon's latest initiative has been dubbed ...

If you're really looking forward to the day when your car says, "You just relax, Dave, and let me do the driving," it just got a little bit closer. GM and Carnegie Mellon University have announced a 5-year, $5 million Collaborative Research Laboratory (CRL) to do work on autonomous ...

Click above for high-res gallery of the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge It was the GM-powered Carnegie Mellon team that took first prize at the DARPA Urban Grand Challenge last year. Now the team will be sending its entrant, nicknamed "Boss," to the 2008 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach on ...

The taxi business is quickly changing, with the Ford Crown Victoria set to take a permanent buyout, hybrids ready to invade Manhattan by 2012, and now robuCab. The driver-free robuCab was developed in France by Robosoft, and the technology is limited for now. It's a 4WD electric vehicle relying on ...

Stanford won the first ever DARPA Challenge -- a test of skill and endurance for autonomous vehicles -- in 2005 with a VW Passat wagon called Stanley. This year it came in second with a VW Passat Wagon called Stanley, Jr. Though the university didn't win the Challenge this year, it did win with VW, ...

John McElroy is host of the TV program "Autoline Detroit". Every week he'll bring his unique insights as an auto industry insider to Autoblog readers. click above image for more live shots from DARPA by John McElroy The DARPA Urban Challenge wrapped up this past weekend and it has to be one of ...

After the DARPA dust settled, only 40 minutes separated the first, second and third place contenders for this year's $2 million bounty. The Carnegie Mellon team, behind the virtual wheel of a tech'd-out Tahoe dubbed the "Boss," won the DARPA Urban Challenge, the first event held in a mock city ...

click above image for more pics from the 2007 DARPA Urban Grand ChallengeRoute 66 passes right through Victorville, California, which is also home to the Route 66 Museum. Much breathless prose has been expended on the joys of piloting your buggy down the Great Diagonal Way. Antithetical to getting ...

The 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge is mere weeks away, and the top tier teams are readying to do battle on a yet-to-be-disclosed course in Victorville, CA. The event will take place November 3rd at the former George Air Force Base, and we'll have our own celebrity blogger, John McElroy, on hand to take ...

Now this is what we call an upgrade: NC State University's Insight Racing team has scored a new set of wheels for the upcoming 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge. The team's Chevrolet Suburban, dubbed "Desert Rat" for the last DARPA challenge, which sent vehicles across the Mojave in the final event, will ...

Every week, in garages around the world, amateur racers spend their hard-earned day-job dollars repairing and improving all sorts of racecars, with one goal in mind - winning a tacky plastic trophy on the weekend. Now the U.S. government has honored that hallowed tradition, announcing that the ...

The DARPA Grand Challenge participants will leave their dusty surrounds on the Sonoran desert and into an urban environment in November 2007. The newly coined Urban Grand Challenge will be held in a mock metropolis, requiring the entrants to negotiate all the ever-changing factors their human ...

Remember William "Red" Whittaker? He is the ex-marine turned college prof that competed in both the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge with a pair of autonomous H1 HUMMERs named H1ghlander and Sandstorm. Unfortunately for Red, neither HUMMER was able to beat Stanley, the autonomous Volkswagen ...

Named in honor of Herbie the Love Bug, the famous number 53, Volkswagen's GTI '53+1' is car that requires no human nanny. It's a fully automatic car that can negotiate twists, turns and straights at the edge of its performance envelope, all without the aid of a driver's touch. The '53+1' uses radar ...

We had the pleasure of catching Dr. Sebastian Thrun's keynote presentation at the 2006 Sensors Expo on Tuesday, where he spoke to the audience about his experience leading Stanford's DARPA Challenge entry to victory last year and how the project's success may affect the way we drive in the ...

The dust has hardly settled on the second DARPA Grand Challege and the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Project Agency has already announced a new challenge that pits competitors and their autonomous vehicles against an urban environment. The new Urban Challenge will occur on November 3, ...

Since ESPN passed on airing the DARPA Grand Challenge in its entirety last October, we’re grateful that PBS is picking up the slack. The esoterically excellent NOVA program will air “The Great Robot Race” tonight on PBS at 8PM EST, in which the winning VW Touareg ...