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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AutonoSys to enter the DARPA Grand ChallengeRobotic driverless vehicles to race across the desert for a $2M prize.November 30th, 2004 -- AutonoSys Inc announced today it plans to enter the DARPA Grand Challenge, a race for robotic vehicles to be held in the Mojave Desert in October 2005. In announcing the entry, Dr. Jim O'Neill, CEO of AutonoSys said. "Like the X prize for private re-useable space craft, the DARPA Grand Challenge represents an incentive to push back the frontiers of technology in an area of vast commercial potential." "We at Autonosys have been developing our autonomous systems technologies for the last 2 years. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a fantastic opportunity for us to demonstrate our world leading technologies against the world's best." DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is sponsoring the $2M prize to stimulate the development of technologies which will allow a third of all US military vehicles to be autonomous by 2015. The achievement of this objective has been mandated by the US Congress. To win the prize, the driverless vehicles must follow a route of approximately 175 miles which is announced only two hours before the race starts, and reach the finish line in under 10 hours. The DARPA Grand Challenge was run for the first time in March 2004, and the furthest any entrant went was 7.4 miles. Autonosys was founded in August 2004 to exploit technology developed by the founders over the last two years. This technology has been tested before against competition from around the world at the Trinity Fire Fighting competition which has been run for the last 11 years. In this contest robots must search a model house and put out a fire in minimum time, all completely without human control. Earlier this year, Autonosys robots placed first and second in the senior division of this contest. The cumulative time taken to find and put out the fire three times was 18 seconds for the first placed Autonosys robot. The fastest non-AutonoSys robot took 125 seconds for the same task. Dr. O'Neill commented, "Given our previous competition successes, we are very confident of our ability to take on the DARPA Grand Challenge. To improve our chances of success even further, we are now working on fundamental improvements in sensing. These improvements in sensing will allow us to see smaller obstacles further out than any competitor in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. Combining this breakthrough in sensing with our navigation and planning subsystems will create a vehicle which will have all the capabilities it needs to find its way across the desert to the finish line within the 10 hour time limit".
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