DARPA Grand Challenge
DARPA Grand Challenge was a series of U.S. Defense Department prize competitions for driverless vehicles in which no entrant finished in March 2004, Stanford's Stanley won in October 2005 and Carnegie Mellon's Boss won the 2007 Urban Challenge.
What happened and why it matters
The challenges launched the modern autonomous vehicle industry, including the self-driving truck and delivery robot efforts that logistics companies now test. In 2004 the best vehicle, Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm, covered only about 7 miles of the desert course. A year later five vehicles finished, and in 2007 robots had to obey traffic rules among moving cars. Engineers from the leading teams went on to run autonomous programs at Google, whose project became Waymo, and at trucking startups. For freight, the legacy is driverless truck pilots on Texas highways and autonomous yard and middle-mile vehicles, which are still being proven on safety, regulation and cost.