Grand Challenge. In 2001, Congress set a goal that by the year 2015, one-third of military combat ground vehicles must be capable of driving themselves autonomously. In other words, only on-board computer control without any human input or assistance is used. Unlike the Mars Pathfinder and Predator Drone that transmit video back to a screen at some remote location and a human then decides what to do, autonomous vehicles must possess all of the sensory and intelligence capability to make their own decisions. The motivation for this Congressional action was simple - to save soldiers' lives. While the entries were no doubt faced with many challenges along the way the fact is the prize was won.

In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Given the disheartening results of the 2004 Grand Challenge, in which no competitor had even made it through a quarter of the course, Thrun might well have been only cautiously optomistic. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the 2005 race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves.

Driverless vehicles compete in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. NOVA site