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UW DARPA Collage

Recruitment Meeting

In 2004 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored a competition called the Grand Challenge. The goal was to build an autonomous robot capable of navigating a 150 mile off road course without any human intervention.

During the first iteration of the contest not one team out of 25 managed to finish the course, and the best entry (CMU's Sandstorm) managed to traverse only 7.4 miles. In 2005 the second Grand Challenge was run with a considerably simplified course. Of the 27 finalists (selected from 195 entries) only 5 managed to complete the course.

The DARPA Grand Challenge is probably one of the most difficult and ambitious contests going on in the world. We want to make UW part of that.

We are a group of students from engineering and math who are interested in putting together an entry for the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge. We have the support of a number of research groups at the university, including LAIR and PAMI. In particular we have the use of the Centaur autonomous vehicle for testing as well as the resources of the UW Robotics Team and UWIRE.

We are looking for individuals who are willing to commit large amounts of time to the project, at the expense of grades, social life, and sleep. This project will consume those who are involved with it, and will leave them mere empty shells of the human beings they used to be. The reward for all their effort will be a minuscule chance of success and perhaps, just perhaps, a chance to face off with the best in the world, and defeat those with hundreds of times our manpower and funding. After all, that's what UW is known for.

We will need engineers, mathies, CSers, business people, graphic artists and basically anyone with a strong skill set who wishes to be part of something amazing.

If you are interested in joining the project or simply keeping up to date on our developments please send us an email to uwdarpa@gmail.com indicating the level of commitment you wish to have and your relevant past experience.