California Business Minute™

Hi, I am Tim Johnson and welcome to the California Business Minute.

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, DARPA held the national unmanned
robotic vehicle competition this past weekend in Victorville.  And while the team from
Stanford crossed the finish line first, they were not the winner.

Speed was just one of the criteria used to determine the overall ranking. DARPA judges
took into account how precisely vehicles negotiated the route and obeyed traffic regulations.
Competitors had to park, circle and properly react to traffic while completing ‘missions’ that
DARPA said simulate tasks vehicles might perform on battlefields.

The US military hopes to be the real winner from the competition by fostering technology
enabling it to make a third of its vehicles robotic by 2015. The US Congress has sanctioned
the goal. The US Department of Defense believes using unmanned ‘robotic vehicles’ will save
soldiers from being killed.

 Eleven robotic cars and trucks began the race and an additional 40 cars driven by people
joined them to simulate city traffic. But after the race, the team from Carnegie Mellon
University was crowned the overall winner.

While the winning team was from Pennsylvania using a General Motors truck, the key
sponsors for the winning team were Google, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, all California based firms.

I am Tim Johnson and this has been the California Business Minute.