The Great Race

Building a vehicle that can drive itself 200 miles cross-country is a monumentally difficult undertaking, and any team that even gets to the starting line will have done something incredible. But it takes more than brilliant minds and fast chips to make a smart car. One thing that becomes increasingly clear is the importance of good old project management. Bill Kehaly may not be a tech guru, but he appears to be a fantastic manager — and he’s recruited an experienced team of accountants, lawyers and other professionals. Unlike the Red Team, which has been run like a military boot camp (Whittaker is a former Marine), the Axion team have been having fun. “No one is being paid here,” Kehaly says; they are doing it because they are enjoying it. From the start, Kehaly realized, if he wanted to get the best from his technical crew he would have to make sure they were properly supported. “I told them, you make the magic happen, and I’ll take care of the mundane stuff.”

It is on this mundane front that the Caltech team have faced their most serious problems. Elliot Andrews, a Caltech administrator and former Harley-Davidson dealer who has also run race-car teams, is advising the students on mechanical matters. At Santa Anita, he tells me, “The goal at Caltech is not so much to win the DARPA Challenge as to provide the students with a good learning experience.” If you really wanted to win, he says, you’d have to run the team much more tightly.

Which raises the issue of where is the right place to do these kinds of projects? Universities are critical crucibles for new ideas and advanced concepts, but are they the best environments for the development of practical applications? As Kehaly sees it, such tasks don’t belong in academe and should be farmed out to small businesses. He admits this would require a serious shift in direction for DARPA, and he personally doubts the agency is ready for such change. “I’m the clone of what DARPA say they want. The trouble is, how much of me could they really stand?” On March 13, when the robots roll, it won’t be just the cars that are racing against one another — we’ll also be watching a competition between different cultures.

 

The DARPA Grand Challenge qualifying trials will be held from Monday, March 8, through Thursday, March 11, at the California Speedway in Fontana. The race itself starts at Slash X Café near Barstow early in the morning of Saturday, March 13. Spectator seating is limited. For more information on the trials and the race, seewww.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/.