Robotic vehicles battles for $2 million prize in ultimate desert race reality show

It's the ultimate robot reality show: 43 contestants competing for a $2 million prize in a government-sponsored ace in California desert, intended to speed development of unmanned military combat vehicles.

The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the Oct. 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge.

The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control.

Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers.

The robots also have to heed speed limits in certain zones and pass through a 100-foot (30-meter)-long tunnel designed to temporarily knock out their GPS capabilities.

None of that thwarted the first competitor, a converted Nissan Xterra built by the Colorado-based Mojavaton team. The vehicle finished in about 20 minutes to cheers from the grandstands.

A modified Volkswagen Touareg dubbed Stanley raised the bar by navigating the course almost flawlessly in about 10 minutes. It was followed by a custom-built vehicle called NaviGATOR, collaboration between the University of Florida, Gainsville and Autonomous Solutions Inc.

"It went exactly as I had predicted," said Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford University, which built Stanley. "I knew exactly how it would react."

A series of vehicles that came afterward stumbled and had to be manually driven off the speedway. One vehicle tried to go around two pieces of metal guardrail instead of between it and stalled. Another made an erroneous right turn at the start and rammed into the wall.

Vehicles have at least two chances to loop around the speedway during the qualifiers. The 20 finalists will be announced next week.