DARPA Grand Challenge

It's that time of year again....
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/discussion.html

For an eye-opening experience, go through the red tape and read the
messages in this forum. Note the messages are posted backwards in
terms of date. So the "tops" of the threads are posted at the ends of
the message-pages.

The ability to make a wheeled autonomous vehicle pass 175 miles of
off-road terrain in less than 10 hours is DARPA's Grand Challange. It
is obvious that this is a gigantic exercise in sensory-motor
coordination on a grand scale.

I have decided the people entering this challenge have no idea what
they are doing. There is a whole giant thread of people arguing
about how to get visual CCD cameras to pick up barbed wire. Is it
not obvious that rusted barbed wire out in a desert is totally
camoflaged? Cameras that use the visual spectrum will never pick it
up no matter how many you use or what kinds of moire-pattern
flickering tricks you try to implement. Even the human eye often
misses barbed wire.

Then there are posts in which several people who are actively in the
races, contend that "object recognition is overkill right now".
Meaning "we dont have object recognition yet and don't know how to get
it, and trying to implement it in our vehicles is above our heads."

I could give several other amazingly absurd examples, but...

If the posts on this forum are not convincing enough, consider that in
last years "race" no vehicle went farther than 5 miles before veering
off course and getting stuck in barbed wire (or catching on fire.. or
ramming into a chain-link fence...etc).

In the realm of Arificial Intelligence, it might seem at first that
our theories of the brain are highly advanced. (which may even be
true). But I think the DARPA Grand Challenge demonstrates, in
embarrasing candidness, how fatallly crude our sensory/motor
coordination theories are.
.