Resumen de A new race of robots.
This article discusses efforts by U.S. engineers to create one-year crash projects to create robots able to dash 200 miles through the Mojave Desert in a day, unaided by humans. It seemed a reasonable goal at the time: after all, 150 miles on relatively smooth, level ground would be but a baby step toward the 200-mile, high-speed desert crossing that the robot must be ready for on March 13, 2004, if it is to win the U.S. Department of Defense's Grand Challenge race, as well as the$ 1-million prize and the prestige that accompanies an extraordinary leap in mobile robotics. But after 20 hours of nonstop debugging, Sandstorm's navigational system is still failing in mystifying ways. Two days ago the machine was driving itself for miles at a time. Director of the Fields Robotics Center, Red Whittaker, attended the conference last February at which officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced their first-ever prize contest, a robot race from Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas see box on opposite page.
