“Great Robot Race”: Geeky Fun

If you’re enough of a dork to be read­ing this site, you’re enough of a dork to enjoy PBS’ “The Great Robot Race,” air­ing next Tuesday night.
The show does a nice job set­ting up the main rivalry of last fall’s Darpa Grand Challenge, the $2 mil­lion unmanned raly across the Mojave Desert. Domineering, jerky genius Red Whittaker and his hyper-​​funded Carnegie Mellon team comes charg­ing out of one cor­ner. Likeably bland Sebastian Thrun and his nerdy Stanford crew ambles out of the other.
And there’s more than a dif­fer­ence in per­son­al­i­ties. Whittaker builds his bots, more or less from the ground up. Thrun gets his pretty much of-​​the-​​shelf from Volkswagen, so he can con­cen­trate on soft­ware instead. Carnegie Mellon uses a laser mounted to a gim­bal to help its robots see; it works like a human head, con­stantly on watch. Stanford opts to keep its lasers sta­tic; but com­bines them with video data, to put together a more com­plex picutre of what’s in front of the dri­ver­less car.
By now, it’s no secret which team came out ahead. But still, there’s a geeky thrill watch­ing the race’s piv­otal moment through the eyes of Stanley, the Stanford machine. That alone is worth check­ing out the hour-​​long doc­u­men­tary.
Like most shows of its kind, “The Great Robot Race” could’ve done bet­ter at bal­anc­ing out its ani­mated schemat­ics and techie expla­na­tions with real human drama. And there was plenty to be had dur­ing the Grand Challenge; Thrun and Whittaker were col­leagues until just a few months before the race. But the show ends on a gee-​​whiz-​​science-​​is-​​awesome, let’s-all-hug moment, instead of with the obvi­ous fric­tion between the Carnegie and Stanford camps. Why set up a rivalry with no ten­sion? Worse, “The Great Robot Race” leaves out per­haps the most fas­ci­nat­ing story of the whole event: the Gray Team from New Orleans, a group of insur­ance com­pany ama­teurs who nearly beat Stanford and Carnegie both, despite hav­ing its shop wrecked by Katrina.

March 24th, 2006 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.