More about the Stanford team that won in robot car race

San Francisco Chronicle published a nice coverage of the yesterday robot car race in Nevada.

Stanford engineers steered the world toward a new era of driverless vehicles Saturday when their robotic Volkswagen SUV was the first to cross the finish line after a 132-mile race across the Nevada desert.

The Stanford car, nicknamed Stanley, unofficially edged out two robotic Hummers from Carnegie Mellon University. The three vehicles were competitors in a race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA, which backed the early research behind the Internet, drummed up interest in the race by offering $2 million to the first team to complete the course in less than 10 hours.

Saturday's results were a triumphant rebound from the underwhelming results of the similar event that DARPA staged in 2004.

The best showing last year was turned in by a Carnegie Mellon robo-Hummer nicknamed Sandstorm, which went just 7.4 miles in that 142-mile course before it strayed off the road and spun its wheels until the rubber burned.

See the complete article Computers, start your engines on the San Francisco Chronicle