Unmanned Urban Combat & Idiocracy: Meet in the Desert Future

Unmanned Urban Combat & Idiocracy: Meet in the Desert Future

DARPA raises stakes for urban robot race

By Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com

update DARPA has granted prize money of $3.5 million for its milestone urban robotics race next November, a far cry from its previously planned trophies.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has approved prize money for the first three finalists of its 2007 Urban Challenge after a confusing twist in the government agency’s right to grant monetary awards, organizers said Friday.

DARPA will now grant $2 million for first place, $1 million for second and $500,000 for third. But the agency dropped award money for "Track B" teams, or those roughly 78 teams (out of 89 teams total) competing without government funding, according to DARPA spokeswoman Johanna Spangenberg Jones. Instead, those teams, which could have won supplemental prize money of up to $150,000, will race for the main prize money.

When the 2007 Urban Challenge was first announced in May, DARPA said it would dole out more than $2 million in prizes to the robotics teams that could navigate mock city terrain over a set time. But DARPA presumably lost its granting authority with the passage of a congressional act—the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007—which gave money-granting power to another government agency, Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. So at the time, instead of awarding $2 million for first prize, $500,000 for second and $250,000 for third, DARPA said it would simply give out trophies to the three finalists.

But after much complaint from contestants, Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, approved the prize money.

The race will see as many as 90 teams "drive" an unmanned robotic road vehicle through city traffic, competing to finish a 60-mile course within six hours. Set for November 3 of next year, the challenge will call on robots to safely obey traffic laws, negotiate busy intersections, merge into moving traffic, avoid obstacles and navigate traffic circles.

DARPA has yet to disclose the race location, but has said it will be in the western United States. The government research group didn’t unveil the 2005 Grand Challenge location in the Mojave Desert until weeks before that race, in order to avoid giving any team an advantage.

Despite the prize money, the teams will undoubtedly have a hard time finishing the 2007 Urban Challenge, the first race of its kind. Of the 23 teams that competed in the 2005 desert race, only four teams’ robots completed the 131-mile course in the allotted 10-hour time. The year before, no teams finished the challenge.

Particularly difficult for the robots next year will be the complexity of the urban environment. That’s because robot sensors can easily stumble because of unknown objects or stimulus. "Stanley," for example, the robotic SUV that was the 2005 Grand Challenge winner from Stanford University’s Racing Team, got confused when a flock of birds fluttered up in front of the vehicle during the race. The vehicle spun its wheels in several directions before the birds settled down and it could proceed.

Excitement is building for next year’s race, nonetheless. Among the teams racing are the Stanford Racing Team, Team MIT from Cambridge, Mass., and a group called "A Bunch of Dropouts" from Kingman, Ariz. Students from North Carolina State’s College of Engineering plan to race a modified Lotus Elise in next year’s race.

"With less than a year until the National Qualification Event, teams will soon begin road-testing their vehicles," Norman Whitaker, DARPA’s Urban Challenge program manager, said in a statement.

DARPA set out several years ago to foster new technologies for unmanned vehicles in the military, under a mandate from Congress. The government has required that 30 percent of Army vehicles be autonomous by 2015 to save lives on the battlefield. And it approved research funds to be used for a series of races, including the Urban Challenge.



UNMANNED COMBAT

Metal Storm Robot Will Demostrate Urban Warfare Capabilites For DARPA

The project design plan includes provision for the integration of Metal Storm weapons with sensors and targeting capabilities to allow the UGVs to act as the eyes and ears of the combat force when operating in hostile urban areas.
Arlington VA (SPX)

Metal Storm announced today that DARPA, the central research and development organization for the US Department of Defense, has selected the company’s proposal titled ’Metal Storm Weapons for Urban Environments’ for a contract award, subject to successful completion of contract negotiations.
This DARPA project is designed to provide a feasibility demonstration of a Metal Storm weapon mounted on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) in direct support of troops in military operations in urban terrain (MOUT) scenarios.

The project design plan includes provision for the integration of Metal Storm weapons with sensors and targeting capabilities to allow the UGVs to act as the eyes and ears of the combat force when operating in hostile urban areas.

Ian Gillespie, Metal Storm’s Acting Chief Executive Officer, said, "This proposal selection underlines the value to our company of the significant engineering and technical effort that we have built up this year. We are very pleased to have our technology proposal selected by DARPA in support of their effort to provide revolutionary war-fighting improvements for the urban environment.

"One of Metal Storm’s primary technical and commercial objectives is to develop low pressure weapon products for use on unmanned vehicles. Selection in this project will further advance the significant technical progress we have already made towards weaponizing unmanned ground and air vehicles," he said.

"We are already underway with our planning for this DARPA project and propose to initiate discussions shortly with major defense contractors in relation to the provision of supporting integration packages which complement our capabilities", said Mr Gillespie.

The project contract details will be negotiated with DARPA shortly. It is expected that the initial feasibility demonstration will be completed inside the next 12 months.

Metal Storm Limited is a defense technology company, employing 60 staff, headquartered in Brisbane, Australia and incorporated in the US, with an office in Washington DC and a defense engineering capability located in Seattle, operating as ProCam Machine LLC. The Company has invented 100% electronic ballistics technology that has no known conventional equivalent. Metal Storm is working with government agencies and departments, and the defence industry to develop a variety of systems utilizing the Metal Storm non-mechanical, electronically fired stacked ammunition system.

http://SpaceWar.com

 
Idiocracy

Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Plot Outline Private Joe Bowers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.
Plot Synopsis: Joe Bauer, an Army librarian, is judged to be absolutely average in every regard, has no relatives, has no future, so he’s chosen to be one of the two test subjects in a top-secret hibernation program. He and hooker Rita were to awaken in one years, but things go wrong and they wake up instead in 2505. By this time, stupid people have outbred intelligent people; the world is (barely) run by morons—and Joe and Rita are the smartest people in America.

Actors: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Eric Anderson, Mitch Baker, See more
Directors: Mike Judge

Reviewer: Todd M. Squires (Los Angeles, Ca. United States)

With absolutely no ad campaign in site, Idiocracy is a film that somehow managed to slip under the radar. There must be an interesting story in how a film directed by Mike Judge (Office Space) and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolf and Dax Shepard could have no trailers, and no print ads. One would think that maybe the film could possibly be so bad that 20th Century Fox was embarrassed and had to release it into a few theaters because they were under some sort of contractual obligation. As it turns out, Idiocracy isn’t that bad. Idiocracy is a film that manages to somewhat effectively touch upon the dumbing down of our society, so much to the point that everyone in the world is a lot more stupid than you and I. Filled with plenty of corporate monopolies and misspelled advertising, this film paints a bleak picture of where we are all headed, as we lazily sit back in our recliners, and allow folks like George Dubya tell us what we should be afraid of. There is a lot to laugh at in this movie, but you can’t help but stop laughing after a while because you realize how on the mark the message Judge is giving.

Idiocracy is uneven, even mediocre at times, but the concept is very smart, and here it is (since almost no one will see it in theaters, I’m not going to worry about spoiling the plot). The film begins with a narrator explaining: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence." Instead, it rewards "those who reproduce the most." To illustrate this, we meet an over-educated, attractive couple who want to have kids, but they’re still getting settled in their jobs, the stock market’s bad, his sperm count’s low... and it doesn’t happen. Then we cut to Clevon, Jr., a white trash muscle-head who sleeps with every woman in the trailer park and who (thanks also to a stem cell research breakthrough) is the ancestor of dozens, then hundreds of children. As this nationwide phenomenon progresses over time, the Bell curve of the U.S. population inexorably slides over to the dumb and trashy side.

Though it’s consistently entertaining and sometimes hilarious, the film’s increasingly uneven structure and overall feel of silliness becomes more of a hindrance than anything else. The storyline revolves around an average American (played by Luke Wilson) who is propelled more than 500 years into the future, where he discovers that the population has grown stupid to such an extent that he’s now considered the smartest man alive. As expected, Judge has fueled Idiocracy with a plethora of satirical elements. For instance, the most popular film in the country is Ass (which, true to its title, consists solely of a 90-minute static shot of a guy’s ass) - and generally pokes fun at the stupidity of popular culture in America. Wilson effectively steps into the shoes of a befuddled everyman, while a cast of familiar faces pop up in fun cameo roles (Stephen Root, who played Office Space’s relentlessly put-upon Milton, has a brief but memorable role as a hillbilly judge). The inclusion of an overly action-oriented third act leaves the film with a fairly bitter aftertaste, and the whole thing just never quite becomes anything more than a passable time-waster (albeit one with tremendous cult potential). That being said, Idiocracy is certainly no worse than most of the comedies that have emerged as of late, and one can’t help but wonder why Fox has so unceremoniously dumped the movie into selected theaters.

Most sociologists assert that natural selection favors the beautiful and smart. But Judge is correct: natural selection favors only one thing, the willingness to have lots of children, and people who let their careers or the costs of college deter them from parenthood end up on the wrong side of the fertility gap. His future scenario is a scary warning; in a way, it’s an update of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the first pessimistic dystopia written a century ago. No one can predict what the future holds, but Judge has a point. If we don’t want the future to be an Idiocracy, we all need to do our part... and raise decent human beings.


"A book if necessary should be a hammer or a hand grenade which you detonate under a stagnant way of looking at the world."
— Wole Soyinka

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