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 ...