There aren’t a lot of benefits to being a journalist. The pay isn’t great, there’s the constant stress of deadlines and people are always indirectly blaming you, “the media,” for sensationalism, blowing things out of proportion or, my favourite, reporting something “out of context,” the default excuse of people caught saying something they shouldn’t have. There are a few bright sides, though. We tend to get a lot of free coffee and sandwiches and every now and then we get to interview one of our childhood heroes (kung fu action star Jackie Chan comes to mind). And on the rarest of occasions we see or experience something that completely blows our mind and makes up for all the bad coffee.
People are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so initially anything that moves will be an improvement. — European Robotics Network chairman Henrik Christensen
That’s what happened to me in January 2008, while I was covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After wading through the crushing crowds and the sensory overload that is the convention floor, I staggered out to the parking lot for my appointment with the “Boss,” the robot vehicle built in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University engineers. Just two months earlier the souped-up General Motors SUV had won the DARPA Urban Challenge, in which fully automated vehicles raced around a ninety-six-kilometre track in a simulated city environment. After explaining how the vehicle worked—it used a combination of radar, laser sensors, cameras and GPS positioning—project manager Chris Urmson took me for a ride around the obstacle course set up in the parking lot.
With me in the passenger seat and Urmson in the back, the Boss lurched to life and began to drive the oval-shaped course, deftly veering around the garbage can and pylon obstacles. I sat there open-mouthed, staring in awe at the empty driver’s seat and the steering wheel as it eerily turned itself left, then right, then left again. I had a flashback to Knight Rider, the eighties show I watched as a kid in which David Hasselhoff drove an intelligent car named KITT. (The tricked-out Trans Am could drive itself, have conversations with people and even, in one outrageously silly episode, help Hasselhoff gamble by somehow magically controlling his dice.) Here was KITT in reality. My mind reeled at what was happening, and what it meant. Sure, I’d seen robots on TV and even a few simple ones working in person, yet here one was chauffeuring me around.
General Motors R&D staff working with the Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon University has converted this Chevrolet Tahoe (named "Boss") into a driverless vehicle that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge: a six-hour, 60-mile skill competition in a mock urban setting in which the vehicles demonstrate safe, effective autonomous ground vehicle navigation in urban traffic.— General Motors
After a few laps around the course, the Boss unexpectedly veered left, jerking me out of my reverie. The car plowed into some garbage cans set up on the side of the obstacle course, then came to an abrupt stop. “That’s never happened before!” Urmson exclaimed from the back seat. Having seen too many movies, I immediately started thinking the machine was turning on us, as in I, Robot or The Matrix. A few tense seconds passed as I tried to remember how Sarah Connor had defeated Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, but then the Boss came back to life. The car calmly backed up and resumed its course. The test drive ended a few minutes later and Urmson set to figuring out what had happened. It turned out the Boss’s cameras weren’t able to see the lane markings on that particular patch of the course, hence the swerve. There was no harm or damage, but still, I thought, robot cars evidently have some way to go before they can be trusted on the streets.
