Robot car learns rules of the road

An N.C. team preps a driverless Lotus for a Pentagon contest

RALEIGH -- The two guys nearly fell off their bikes staring at a Lotus Elise roadster as it rumbled past them on N.C. State University's Centennial Campus. Nobody was driving the curvy blue sports car. The cyclists struggled for words.

"Hey," one said. "Is that, uh, automatic?"

He looked for an explanation from a half dozen NCSU students and middle-aged engineers in a pickup truck. They wore matching red T-shirts and grins.

They never get tired of turning heads with the car they call Lone Wolf, a car they are teaching to drive itself.

Lone Wolf is North Carolina's only entry in a four-year Pentagon contest to help build driverless vehicles for future wars. Congress wants one-third of all U.S. battlefield vehicles to be able to operate without drivers by 2015.

The competition is tough. Only five robot vehicles finished the Pentagon's 132-mile Desert Challenge race in 2005.

Insight Racing, a Cary-based group of students and engineers, had a $50,000 budget and Desert Rat, a Chevy Suburban crammed with hardware. Desert Rat conked out after 26 miles but earned a respectable 12th place.

Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competition is moving from the desert to the city. It will culminate Nov. 3 with the DARPA Urban Challenge, a 60-mile race through mock-urban traffic somewhere on the West Coast. The first three finishers will share $3.5 million in cash.

The Urban Challenge started with 89 entries last fall. The field was winnowed last week to 53. Competitors range from groups of students to multimillion-dollar industry-university ventures. Insight Racing has a budget somewhere above $200,000, spokesman Walt Sliva said, funded by sponsors including NCSU, Lotus, SAS Institute and Northrop Grumman.

Lotus and other carmakers are backing DARPA Challenge competitors as part of the industry's effort to improve technology that helps cars avoid accidents.

Grayson Randall of Cary, a senior software engineer for IBM who mentors high school students in robotics, is Insight Racing's president and team leader. He balked in September when Lotus Engineering, an arm of the British sports car builder, offered a car for the urban race.

The Elise goes from zero to 60 mph in under 5 seconds. It retails for $50,000. The trunk has space for a small picnic basket.

"I told them, 'Boy, it's awfully small,' " said Randall, 51.

Randall and his teammates -- they're all volunteers, nobody gets paid -- quickly changed their minds. A sexy sports car would help them stand out and attract sponsors, they said.

Besides, it would be more challenging to design robot technology for the tiny car, they figured -- and that might be more valuable to the Pentagon.

"If you fill a Hummer with enormous amounts of hardware, there is no space for anything else," said Simon Cobb of Lotus Engineering. "The objective is to keep soldiers out of harm's way and to use technology to do the dangerous stuff."

Insight Racing engineers have had preliminary talks with Fort Bragg officials about military applications for robot vehicles.

"They desperately want automated supply vehicles so that in Iraq, you know, they can just have a car drive by itself with supplies," said Steve Kuekes, a software engineer. "And if somebody blows it up with an IED, well, big deal, we've got more cars. We didn't blow up anybody's son or daughter.

"And they envision automated security patrols, on a base here in the U.S. or on bases overseas," Kuekes said.

Software engineer Mike Randall, 24, Grayson's son, was one of the guys in red T-shirts. On a sunny Monday he drove the Lotus from its garage near the McKimmon Center to Centennial Campus, where NCSU wanted to record a promotional video.