Final comments from Scott Ettinger on the robot race:
DARPA announced the winners at an awards ceremony this morning. After reviewing their data from the race, they determined that first place goes to Carnegie Mellon University,
second place to Stanford University,
and third place to Virginia Tech University.
Carnegie Mellon will receive a two million dollar prize, Stanford will receive one million dollars, and Virginia Tech will receive a five hundred thousand dollar prize. DARPA has not released any official times or any data on how they scored the race. The Stanford team is pleased with their performance in the contest. As lead software developer Mike Montemerlo said “It was a great day for robotics”.
Editor’s note: We are all very excited about CMU’s achievement (especially since CMU was the also sponsored by Intel). Here are some concluding words from the leader of the CMU team, from their website:
“Robots sometimes stun the world, inspire a lot of people and change the belief of what is possible,” said William “Red” Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon robotics professor and team leader of Tartan Racing. “We’ve seen that here and once the perception of what’s possible changes it never goes back. This is a phenomenal thing for robotics.”
