The DARPA Grand Challenge is a race
for a $2 million prize funded by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United
States Department of Defense , where cars had to drive themselves over a hundred miles of
challenging desert terrain without and communication with humans, using GPS,
computers and a sophisticated array of sensors. This was the first in a series of
challenges aimed at a congressional mandate stating that by 2015 one-third of the
operational ground combat vehicles of the US Armed Forces should be unmanned.
