ORO GRANDE, Calif.–Carnegie Mellon University and its robotics guru, Red Whittaker, have been vindicated.
By doing so, the team regained its pride after two stinging defeats in 2004 and 2005.
(Stanfordclaimed the second prize of $1 million this year.)
That was simply that the competition seeded the idea in people’s minds that self-driving cars are possible.
“It was spooky.”
“There’s clearly more development needed.”
Nearly all of the teams' robots suffered some difficulty.
But it was pushed to the No.
The team couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the robot initially.
It was cut from the race within the first two hours.
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Still, the near-accident was amusing to spectators.
CMU’s Boss finished the course nearly 20 minutes faster than Stanford’s robot, Junior.
On the flip side, many more winners emerged from the event than just the obvious.
The search giant backed two teams in the winner’s circle, CMU and Stanford.
In contrast to the last two races, 2007’s challenge had much more of a circus feel.
Still, the drama of the competition was largely between CMU and Stanford.
One race veteran put it like this: “Competition is huge for this event.
The spirit of competition focuses everyone to solve the problem at hand.”
