NCSU entry struck from robot race

Lone Wolf, a blue sports car that learned to drive itself this year at N.C. State University, was eliminated Thursday from a $3.5 million Pentagon competition that will end Saturday in a robot race through urban traffic at an old military base in the Mojave Desert.

"We were pretty close, but we didn't quite make the finals," Grayson Randall of Cary, Lone Wolf's chief creator, said by telephone from Victorville, Calif. Randall heads Insight Racing, a team of students and engineers who designed the robot Lotus.

Eleven driverless cars were chosen Thursday for the finals of the DARPA Urban Challenge, part of a Pentagon push to design robot ground vehicles for war zones. The robot cars and sport utility vehicles will have six hours Saturday to complete a 60-mile urban course.

Randall's group took Lone Wolf to the former George Air Force Base last week for six days of qualifying trials. Some cars crashed, froze or ran amok during tests of their ability to merge with traffic, handle road obstacles and navigate four-way stops. When the trials ended Wednesday, 16 of the 35 semifinalists had been disqualified.

Lone Wolf was one of 19 still in contention Thursday morning. DARPA officials had planned to name 20 finalists but, without explanation, trimmed the field to 11.

Randall said DARPA did not release scoring details or explain why Lone Wolf did not make the final cut. Among other semifinalists that fell short were teams, some with multimillion-dollar corporate backing, based at Georgia Tech, Caltech, Case Western Reserve and Princeton universities.

"Obviously, there were some criteria they were looking at. They're planning to have a lot of traffic on the course Saturday, so I don't know if it's the number of vehicles they felt they could manage on the course," Randall said.

And the finalists are ...

The finalists include teams from Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Virginia Tech and Carnegie Mellon.

"Vehicles competing in the Urban Challenge will have to think like human drivers and continually make split-second decisions to avoid moving vehicles, including robotic vehicles without drivers, and operate safely on the course," Norman Whitaker, a DARPA official, said in a news release.

Lotus, the British carmaker, brought a few of its sports cars to Victorville this week to promote its role as one of Lone Wolf's sponsors. Randall's wife, Mary Ellen, said Insight Racing team members are sticking around for Saturday's race, and they'll have time today to indulge in some pleasure driving.

"We're going to hang around," Mary Ellen Randall said, "and drive Lotuses."