A total of 53 teams are currently in the running for November’s 2007 Urban Challenge, a robot race through a mock city sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But to take home first prize, all those squads will have to go through the reigning champions: a group from Stanford University whose souped-up Volkswagen Touareg, “Stanley,” won a similar race through the Mojave Desert in 2005.
The team that built Stanley was led by Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. For this year’s race, Mr. Thrun and a group of students have stuck with Volkswagen: Their new machine, “Junior,” is a driverless Passat, according to Campus Technology. —Brock Read
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