Technology Review - Published By MIT
Advertisement

Eyes on the Prize

If prizes like the Grand Challenge work so well at advancing technology, why not create more of them?

By Dylan Tweney

October 18, 2005

smaller text tool iconmedium text tool iconlarger text tool icon

When Stanford University's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, "Stanley," won the Grand Challenge last week, robot enthusiasts everywhere cheered. By completing a 210-kilometer course over difficult desert terrain in just under seven hours, Stanley set an unprecedented milestone for autonomous vehicles.

Even more amazingly, four other teams' vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times.

"It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time," says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team.

The Lindbergh analogy is apt. Both the famed aviator and the Stanford team were motivated to accomplish their feat by the tantalizing promise of prize money. In Charles Lindbergh's case, it was a $25,000 purse that wealthy hotelier Raymond Orteig offered, in 1919, for the first nonstop aircraft flight between New York and Paris. In 1927, a 25-year-old Lindbergh finally captured the prize, by taking off from Long Island and landing in Paris 33 1/2 hours later, in a $10,000, custom-built monoplane named after his financial backers' hometown, St. Louis.

For the Stanford team, winning the Grand Challenge meant collecting the $2 million prize put up by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) earlier this year. Not a bad return on a project that Thrun estimates cost about $500,000.

The Grand Challenge is just the latest example of how prize money can be an effective -- and extremely efficient -- way to stimulate rapid technological development. And while prizes might not work in every field of technological research, observers say it might be time to explore the prize model more deeply, particularly as the United States launches several multibillion-dollar projects, such as replacing the Space Shuttle, returning to the Moon, and sending humans to Mars.

DARPA's mission is to stimulate research in defense-related areas, then leave development of viable applications to others. That's exactly how this year's Grand Challenge played out, with 195 teams entering the competition, five teams successfully completing the course -- and a whole new crop of inventors, engineers, computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and even high-school students stimulated to enter the field of autonomous vehicles.

That will undoubtedly pay dividends for the military in the future, since many of the universities and corporations that fielded Grand Challenge teams also work on DARPA projects. Thrun's work, for instance, has been attracting DARPA funding for more than eight years, and he intends to continue applying for defense grants in the future.

Story continues below

Competing in the Challenge offered benefits to the teams and their sponsors, too, even for those that didn't win, says Jon Feiber, a managing partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm that cosponsored the Stanford team. Among the payoffs were educating students, raising the level of interest in (and funding for) robotics, forging partnerships between academic engineering departments and industry, and making connections among researchers, students, and DARPA personnel.

Of course the Grand Challenge isn't the only recent feat of engineering inspired by the tantalizing promise of a pot of lucre for the victors. Last year's Ansari X Prize paid $10 million to aircraft designer Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne team for completing two suborbital space flights at an altitude of at least 100 kilometers in the span of two weeks.

Comments

Log In

Forgot your password?     Register »
Advertisement

Videos

Making 3D Maps on the Move
Technology Review November/December 2009

Current Issue

Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map
The United States has vast supplies of this cleaner fossil fuel. But how should we use it?
Featured Content
Sponsored by:
White Papers

Twelve ways to reduce costs with SQL Server 2008
Find out how to reduce costs and get more efficient

Download

Total Economic Impact of SQL Server 2008 Upgrade
Forrester reports on increasing productivity and management capabilities

Download 

Achieving Cost and Resource Savings with UC
How Office Communications Server R2 and Exchange Server can make your business smarter and more efficient

Download 

The Compelling Case for Conferencing
Read how you can improve workload support and find IT efficiencies

Download

How Windows Server 2008 R2 Helps Optimize IT and Save you Money
Read how you can improve workload support and find IT efficiencies

Download

Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Live Migration
See how Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V enable virtualization and Live Migration

Download
Advertisement
Subscribe to Technology Review's daily e-mail update. Enter your e-mail address

TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES
Advertisement
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2009 Technology Review. All Rights Reserved.