Prize Roundup: Heinlein Prize, International Rocketry Challenge, CanSat winners, SEDS Conference, More

Heinlein Prize Honors Elon Musk of SpaceX - Heinlein Prize Trust

06/16/2011: Swing Test - SpeedUp

NASA And DARPA Offer Students Chance To Support Future Missions - NASA - This is for the Zero Robotics competition using floating SPHERES platforms on the International Space Station

The CanSat Competition has posted their 2011 Competition Winners and 2011 Cansat Photos.  Also, the 2012 mission has already been identified: Mission: Planetary Atmospheric Entry Vehicle.

Raytheon has a number of posts about the International Rocketry Challenge at the International Paris Air Show.  You can see all of them at their 2011 Paris Air Show - Team America Rocketry Challenge tag.  The most recent post is Raytheon-Sponsored Texas High School Team Wins International Rocket Fly-Off at Paris Air Show.

Northrop Grumman Announces Student Winners of Fourth Annual Engineering Scholars Program for Woodland Hills Facility - SpaceRef

SEDS Space Vision 2011 - RLV News - The early Speakers list for the conference includes a number of people with prize connections: Bill Nye (Executive Director of the Planetary Society, which has held a number of space competitions like the Apophis Mission Design Competition and numerous contests with themes like space art and mission names), Robert Richards (a Google Lunar X PRIZE competitor), Will Pomerantz (formerly of the X PRIZE Foundation), Jon Goff (who was part of the winning Masten Space Systems Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge team), and Ben Brockert (also from the Masten NG-LLC team, and now a member of another prize-winning NG-LLC team, Armadillo Aerospace).

Team Phoenicia sells first engine - RLV News

Briefs: Masten intern jobs; Langley lifting body event; Bruce Cordell interview - RLV News

White Label Space starts testing engines - RLV News

The next 2 links are from @ChallengeGov:

Now this is a cool ride! - The White House Blog discusses the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat-support Vehicle (XC2V).

The latest International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge opened on May 31. 

A TEA Party organization called TEA Party in Space has a platform that includes the following plank:

NASA shall use competitions and prizes whenever feasible to stimulate the private sector, including individual American inventors, to achieve innovative and affordable solutions to technological challenges.

Conrad Award Scholarships, Brain-Computer Interface Workshop, ISS Formation Flying, Lunar Sample Return, More

@TeamPrometheus SS2S recived the parts we made for the protoshot mark III! http://bit.ly/7tMsdk

@PeterDiamandis here at MIT X Prize event with my friend Bob Metcalf brainstorming BCI prizes

See many more tweets on the Brain-Computer Interfaces MIT X PRIZE Lab workshop at #bcixprize

@progautoxp If you will be @ #NAIAS next week stop by the #PIAXP booth. Learn more about the competition & meet qualified teams. Drive the cars too! #FB

@spacecom Scaled Composites’ Peter Siebold Wins Iven C.Kincheloe Award: Peter Siebold (Photo: Scaled Composites) Cal Poly gr... http://bit.ly/8RM13z

@NASA_Ames DARPA looks to use SPHERES (formation flying test on ISS) for crowdsource experiment http://is.gd/5RwXl

The previous tweet is on a Wired Danger Room article. From DARPA's RFI linked in the article:

DARPA seeks an open-innovation approach to the development of algorithms for the control of the Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage, and Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) that operate inside the International Space Station. ... DARPA is interested in novel, out-of-the-box ideas for involving vast groups of people in SPHERES algorithm and software development, and potentially operations. Such concepts may involve, for instance, competitions, prize awards, massively-distributed collaborative development, viral campaigns, prediction markets, new ventures ...

An Excellent Scholarship Opportunity for Spirit of Innovation Awards Participants - Spirit of Innovation Awards blog

MAKE visits MicroRAX HQ - Make blog - Beam power team LaserMotive is part of the story here.

Secor Strategies Sponsors & Helps Coordinate NASA Astronuat Glove Contest - Secor Strategies blog

Notional Next Rocket... - Unreasonable Rocket

Google Lunar X PRIZE teams will want to keep an eye on this as the 3rd New Frontiers mission is selected:

New Frontiers Candidates Selected - Future Planetary Exploration blog - One of the candidates is a lunar sample return mission.
More on MoonRise New Frontiers Proposal - Future Planetary Exploration blog
Moon Mission In Running For Next Big Space Venture - Moon Daily

Robot Party at Carnegie Science Center

Robots Invade Carnegie Science Center - WebWire - Here's the summary from this announcement:

A robotic rover designed to explore the surface of the moon. An automated car that drives by itself. Robots that detonate suspected bombs. Toy robots of every shape and size. Robots designed to battle each-other like modern gladiators. And a six-foot robot named “Al” that likes to dance.

These robots and more will be on-hand at Carnegie Science Center’s Robot Block Party, July 19 - 20, a celebration of everything robotic.

The announcement includes a list of some of the robots that will be there. These include at least a couple prize winners:

Boss, from Carnegie Mellon University – Winner of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, Boss is a fully autonomous SUV in which visitors to the Robot Block Party will have the opportunity to ride.

and

A highlight of the weekend will be the attendance of Red Rover, from Astrobotic Technology, Inc. A hardy, intelligent roving robot designed by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, Red Rover is the platform for a joint venture of Carnegie Mellon, The University of Arizona, and Raytheon to win the Google Lunar X Prize.

Here's a link to the Robot Block Party.

University of Cincinnati Department Goes for Prizes

This PDF newsletter from the University of Cincinnati Mechanical Engineering department features a lot of prize competitions:

• the PACE Console Design Competition (for the center console of GM vehicles)
• 2007 Formula SAE Competition (designing and making a Formula One race car)
• DARPA Urban Challenge (computer-controlled cars driving in an urban environment)
• Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC; computer-controlled ground vehicles with military objectives)
• U.S Department of Energy Solar Decathlon (solar home competition)

I have to say that if you're doing a senior project, graduate thesis, or similar major academic effort with the potential for hands-on "real-work" application of theories learned in other classes, getting involved with a prize competition seems like a great way to give motivation and focus for your work.

Miltary Prize Roundup

The British MOD (Ministry of Defense) Grand Challenge had some announcements in January. They're looking for a contractor to support the MOD Grand Challenge event. They also made some changes to the MOD Grand Challenge plans based on observing the U.S. DARPA Urban Challenge, such as making it a 2-phase competition.

Here's a blog from one of the MOD Grand Challenge teams - this one from Reading University. The MOD site has much more on all the teams on their teams page.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Wearable Power Prize site has some fairly new updates involving Instructions and Guidelines for teams as they make and send in certain required documents:

Fuel Plan Instructions
System Description White Paper

Finally, in the Military Prizes section on the right I've updated the Singapore TechX Challenge link which apparently moved.

Pomerantz Report on Government Nanotech Prizes

William Pomerantz reports on a panel he was on concerning nonotechnology and government prizes. Here's more about the panel at Nanowerk. Will's talk compared government prize like the NASA Centennial Challenges and DARPA's Challenges. The problem with getting any funding at all to keep making progress with Centennial Challenges is mentioned.

One bill that's discussed in the post is the Reward Innovation in America Act sponsored by Senator Mark Pryor.

Lessons from the 2007 "Prize Season"

Advanced Nanotechnology summarizes the recent big prize competitions (specifically the Lunar Lander Challenge, Space Elevator Games, and DARPA Urban Challenge), and proposes a few lessons learned from these events.

The post also suggests some principles for space projects, whether the project is winning the Lunar X PRIZE or NASA's manned return to the Moon program.

DARPA Urban Challenge Over; Winners to be Announced

The main event of the DARPA Urban Challenge is over, and the winners will be announced tomorrow. Michael Belfiore has related all of the events of the qualification rounds and the main event in a series of Wired posts. As you might imagine, there were a lot of amusing, interesting, sometimes surprising events during the challenge, as the robot cars are not quite ready for real urban driving situations, but are making a lot of progress. The fact that the progress differs from team to team makes for some interesting situation.

The Wired posts chronicle the events as team after team was eliminated from the challege. Six teams were able to finish the race, but from the posts it sounds like the teams from CMU, Stanford, and Virginia Tech are the front-runners. The Ben Franklin Racing Team, Cornell, and MIT also finished.

I have to say that given the difficulty of the challenge, it's amazing that any of the teams finished. I wonder when we'll be seeing parts of this technology - perhaps not full-fledged robot cars at first, but starting with more advanced vehicle safety measures, or robot cars in partly controlled environments - appear on the road?

Update (November 4, 2007): The winners have been announced ... I don't see them at Wired or TG Daily yet, so check here.

DARPA Urban Challenge In Progress

As with the Space Elevator Games and Lunar Lander Challenge, I'm not able to do justice to the DARPA Urban Challenge - there's too much going on here while all these big prize events take place. I have a huge stack of Urban Challenge links I'll probably never get a chance to sort through. Fortunately, this one is also being covered in great detail. Cosmic Log points to the DARPA Urban Challenge coverage by Michael Belfiore for Wired Danger Room. You might want to start with his preview article. The latest news is that 6 teams have been eliminated during the National Qualification Event. More will be cut before the finals on November 3.

Michael explains the most important rule of the game (after all these are supposed to be logistics vehicles, not RoboCop tanks):

DARPA director Tony Tether outlined the basic rules for competing teams in a briefing last night, concluding with the most important rule of all: "Don't hit anyone!!!"

That's with three exclamation points, in about a 10,000-point font size, just so no one would miss it.

Yes, the exclamation points about about 4 feet tall.

tgdaily is also covering the event with a lot of posts, videos, and slide shows.

DARPA Urban Challenge Approaching

Yes, October is a big month for several innovation competitions. The DARPA Urban Challenge has the following events soon:

October 24-25: Teams Arrive
October 26-31: National Qualification Event
November 3: Urban Challenge Final Event

It's all at Victorville, CA. Here's the full schedule, and here are details like directions and what's happening at the events for spectators.

The event guidelines with a number of updates were also recently posted. DARPA isn't forgetting important aspects of prize competitions, such as giving an area for team sponsors, and setting aside time for a "military robotics session" that lets the teams show their technologies to "user communities, acquisition agents, and other Government organizations tracking progress in the field".

This should be interesting to those who can't make it to the event. DARPA plans to "produce a live video webcast of the UCE at a site linked to www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge. This site will also have tracking maps and a progress board to monitor each autonomous vehicle. A 3-D option may be available after the event that will allow individual vehicles to be tracked and viewed in a rendered landscape. A generic representation will be provided for each vehicle, or teams may optionally submit more realistic models including sponsor names and team name".

Several Articles on DARPA Urban Challenge

I'm giving a bunch of links on the DARPA Urban Challenge, not only because it's a prominent innovation incentive prize program that will undoubtably show a lot about how (and perhaps a bit of how not) to run such competitions, but also because I can imagine this type of robot car technology being featured in space applications (rovers, Moon buggies, etc) or even space prize competitions.

Here's the best site I've seen on the DARPA Urban Challenge. Control Engineering has a blog that's covering the Challenge. Among other things, this blog has a series of detailed posts on dozens of the teams competing in the challenge. It's full of pictures, too. I recommend starting in the archives so you can pick up with Team #1.

There are a lot of other articles on the challenge. Many of them are on teams passing DARPA's on-site review.

Autonomous vehicles: Leave the driving to the car - also in Control Engineering; discusses the University of Minnesota team's Lone Wolf racecar.

Minnesota Public Radio also has an article on the Lone Wolf. They also have a cool video of the robot racer instead of much driving around the race track.

Technology Evangalist also put together a video with background on the modified Lotus than going around the track.

Team Oshkosh and TerraMax Chosen to Compete in DARPA Urban Challenge, by Motor Trend's "Truck Trend". This one's a big truck by Oshkosh Truck Corporation.

Space Daily has a DARPA Urban Challenge story in their "Robo Space" category titled "Drive-By-Wire And Human Behavior Systems Key To Virginia Tech Urban Challenge Vehicle". "VictorTango has converted two Escape hybrids donated by Ford Motor Co. into autonomous vehicles by outfitting them with a "drive-by-wire" system, a powerful computer system, laser scanners, cameras, and a GPS" according to one of the team members. This is one of the teams that got $1M to help them in the challenge, and they've also gotten $100,000 from Caterpillar, and also other sponsorship funds.

KCPW News in Salt Lake City has a post about 3 Utah teams that advanced in the challenges. They emphasize that the current steps in the technology can be put to business use even before the technology meets the needs of the challenge sponsors. For example, they can already configure a tractor to plow fields without a driver with the robot car technology. That's a good lesson for folks with ambitious space plans - get to your big goal using steps that pay for themselves.

DARPA Names MIT's 'robocar' a semifinalist - from MIT news. "The MIT vehicle uses multiple laser range scanners, high-rate video cameras and automotive radar units to perform autonomous planning and motion control."

Here's a collection of photos of the MIT entry sprouting all sorts of sensors. It's probably easiest to view them as a slide show.

TG Daily has some good DARPA Challenge posts. It sounds like they may continue the series of team interviews.

Shoestring budget won't stop Princeton Urban Challenge team - They had a good way to figure out what kind of vehicle to use - a Ford Escape Hybrid. "We picked it because it was free". There are some interesting tradeoffs the team has made to enable them to solve the problems in the particular environment they will encounter without spending much money on hardware. It goes into some technical details (without being at all difficult to read) like GPS (which every space person should understand) and image processing to distinguish different types of features. I liked this one.

Axion Racing Interview - This one also goes into the sensors, like laser range finders, cameras, FLIR (I think that's foreward-looking infrared radar), and radar. It covers things you might not thing about at first, like having the computers ignore windshield wiper imagery noise. This one's a sturdy armored truck, so they're not worried about crashing into the light racecars ... but that Oshkosh giant is another story.

Car Buyer's Notebook has an article about "Junior", a Passat wagon that's in the Challenge.

36 DARPA Urban Challenge Semi-finalist Teams

Space for All has a link to a post by Cosmic Log on the DARPA Urban Challenge. This post also links to some articles about the GM Volt plug-in hybrid car that may be of interest to those following vehicle prizes like the Urban Challenge, or more likely the Automotive X PRIZE.

The Cosmic Log article is on the DARPA announcement of 36 semi-finalist teams in the DARPA Urban Challenge. The announcement also included the location of the "National Qualification Event", which will trim the list of teams down to 20, and the finals. Both events will be held at a military training base in Victorville, CA. The Cosmic Log article also has links to all 36 teams.

Also from the Cosmic Log article, here's a press release from the Carnegie Mellon University team, one of the teams that made the cut.

Ben Franklin Racing Team Videos

The Ben Franklin Racing Team is one of the competitors in DARPA's Urban Challenge, of course from the Philadelphia area (University of Pennsylvania and a bit farther away Lehigh University). If you go to their blog you can see a number of videos of their car (not just the 1 I linked to), including recent tests during their DARPA site visit. I have to admit that the computer(s) are doing better than I did in my first driver's exam, especially in the 3-point turn.

Find Your Home DARPA Urban Challenge Team

... on this map of DARPA Urban Challenge site visit teams.

Cornell's DARPA Urban Challenge Entry

Cnet News.com has an article on DARPA's Urban Challenge, focusing on the Cornell University team, the reactions they get when onlookers see their robotic car, and the crucial month of June when DARPA makes site visits to the teams. There are some pictures of the robot cars with the article. Two other teams featured prominently include the MIT team and "A Bunch of Dropouts".

Nova presents the Great Robot Race

Cosmic Log sends us on a weekend field trip to The Great Robot Race. This is an hour long show by Nova about the original DARPA Grand Challenge in desert terrain, predescessor of the DARPA Urban Challenge. It was originally aired last year, and is showing on May 22, 2007. It can also be viewed online at the link above. What might be even more interesting to the web surfers that made it here is the online video clip collection and other information about the challenge.

2007 DARPA Urban Challenge update

The San Jose Mercury News reports on some teams local to Silicon Valley that advanced to the next round of DARPA's 2007 Urban Challenge, a competition to develop robotic vehicles that can work in urban traffic environments. The competition will be held in November. The winner of the previous (but non-urban) challenge, the Stanford Racing Team, is one of these competitors. It includes contributions from Stanford's computer and engineering departments whose past students include many famous entrepreneurs, including the ones in charge of the blog software I'm using. You can see on the Stanford Team's sponsorship page that the Google folks remember their roots. (Well, it wasn't all that long ago). Take a look at the Stanford Team's web page; you can see it's a major effort.

The Mercury News article also mentions the Sydney-Berkeley Driving Team (the news article and DARPA put Berkeley first; the team puts Sydney first), again with some pretty impressive team member bios and sponsors. The final team mentioned is Team Orange, again obviously a big effort. Fundraising was made easier for many of the teams by $1 million grants from DARPA.

There are too many teams for me to describe, but DARPA has a list of links to the various registered competitors' web pages.

Grand Engineering Challenges

Cosmic Log posts about the Grand Challenges Ahead for engineers. These aren't necessarily prize-related challenges, but the Ansari X PRIZE and the DARPA Grand Challenge are mentioned as examples of past challenges. The article is on work being done by the National Academy of Engineering to investigate Grand Engineering Challenges to spotlight for this century. All of the analogies for future challenges mentioned in the article were prize-related: 2 X PRIZE Foundation challenges (the Archon Genomics X PRIZE and the Automotive X PRIZE) and the DARPA Urban Challenge. Some of the other challenges mentioned also sounded similar to past, present, or proposed prize challenges, such as the Grainger potable water challenge and the Virgin Earth Challenge.

more on 2 vehicle races

Cosmic Log has posted more on the Automotive X PRIZE draft rules that were just release, and also the DARPA Urban Challenge. They are 2 entirely different challenges, but it gets one thinking in different ways when you read about the 2 challenges in the same article. Of course there are other challenges like the British MOD Grand Challenge and Singapore's TechX Challenge, as well as interest (if not available funding) in a Centennial Challenge for a Lunar Vehicle that at least in part remind one of the DARPA challenge.

DARPA Grand Challenge prize is back!

As reported in an earlier blog post, the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge was in danger of losing the prize incentive that helped the original DARPA Grand Challenge succeed. The Challenge was still on, and in fact a number of contestant teams got grant money to enable them to mount serious development efforts, but the incentive to win for both the grantees and the other contestants was reduced to bragging rights and a trophy. For such a well-respected and publicized prize these incentives are significant, especially for an organization like a university where reputation counts in many ways, but a cash prize makes things interesting and competitive on a whole different level.

As it turns out, the DARPA Grand Challenge cash prize is back! Here is a DARPA news release that explains this turn of events. Out of the teams that meet the challenge (assuming there are any), the top teams will win $2 million, $1 million, and $500,000. That should give a lot of motivation for the contestants.