Congratulations to Carnegie Mellon's Red Team Racing for coming in 2nd and 3rd in the DARPA Grand Challenge. This was a race of robot vehicles that had to drive themselves around a 132 mile desert course. Last year, the best car only made it about 7 miles. This year, 5 vehicles finished the race. Unfortunately (for an alum like me :-), the two CMU entries lost to the Stanford team. As this article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette points out, at least the Professors leading the Stanford team went to CMU.
The funny thing about robot racing is that they should be able to tell who won ahead of time. They program them to run a certain course at a fixed speed, and in general they finish to within a few seconds of schedule. CMU's H1ghlander vehicle had the fastest plan, but it veered way off schedule for some reason. The latest entry on the Red Team web site suggested engine problems. I hope they'll let us know what happened.
I love the "Wildest Dream" poster they have (pdf!). Very cool image.