Word: darpa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, that secretive band of Pentagon geeks that searches obsessively for the next big thing in the technology of warfare, is 50 years old. To celebrate, DARPA invited Vice President Dick Cheney, a former Defense Secretary well aware of the Agency's capabilities, to help blow out the candles. "This agency brought forth the Saturn 5 rocket, surveillance satellites, the Internet, stealth technology, guided munitions, unmanned aerial vehicles, night vision and the body armor that's in use today," Cheney told 1,700 DARPA workers and friends who gathered at a Washington hotel to mark...
...DARPA's first driverless rally, in 2004, was an off-road race. This year the agency focused on urban features. The 60-mile (100 km) course included intersections and buildings, and contestants had to park and merge with traffic. On the outside, most of the vehicles looked quite similar: conventional sedans and SUVs plastered with corporate-sponsor logos and encrusted with sensors, their backseats loaded with rack-mounted PCs. The one big exception was a monster truck so enormous that the course had to be widened to accommodate...
...atmosphere was very much that of a bullfight: once the contestants were released onto the course, nobody was quite sure what they would do. (For the record, every vehicle comes with a remote-control kill switch, which sits in the sweaty palms of a DARPA employee in a chase car.) The autobots moved slowly and haltingly, their computer brains thrashing furiously to interpret incoming visual data. But like polite student drivers, they stopped at every stop sign and signaled before every turn...
...technology was on display in Victorville, but the DARPA challenge also demonstrated a new way of developing technology. You could call it the open-sourcing of R&D, or maybe the American Idol-izing of it. Amateurs are free to mix it up with big corporations and research universities. MIT was among the 35 competitors, but so was Team Gray Racing, a Louisiana troupe started by insurance-company executives after they heard about the first DARPA road race. "They said, 'We've got some good tech people--why don't we do this?'" says a Team Gray member. And DARPA...
...winner of the DARPA Urban Challenge, Carnegie Mellon's Chevy Tahoe, a.k.a. "Boss," finished 20 minutes ahead of the runner-up, a Passat from Stanford. The Chevy's average speed of 14 m.p.h. (23 km/h) wasn't exactly blazing but was a big improvement over the 2004 race, in which no robots finished at all. The atmosphere was celebratory, though tempered by the uncanniness of watching driverless cars à la Stephen King's Christine, a 1958 Plymouth with a taste for blood. "It's pretty creepy when your vehicle starts beeping and it peels out," says a grad student...