The Red Team is going racing again.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last week announced it will sponsor its second Grand Challenge race for robotic vehicles on Oct. 8, 2005 and William "Red" Whittaker said his Pittsburgh-based Red Team intends to be there.

But this time, the Red Team will have a new, additional sponsor ---- AM General, the South Bend, Ind., maker of military Humvees and the civilian Hummer sport utility vehicles.

Sandstorm, the Red Team's entry in March's inaugural Grand Challenge event in Barstow, Calif., was based on a well-worn 1986 Humvee that Whittaker purchased from a farmer. That vehicle was in South Bend last week, being worked over and upgraded by AM General factory specialists.

Also on the racks at the factory was a new Hummer H1, the civilian version of the military Humvee, which will be the Red Team's second entry in the Grand Challenge event. The new H1 includes a number of electronic advancements, such as traction control, not available in the 1986 versions and will have drive-by-wire systems built in, rather than added on as with Sandstorm.

"AM General is an example of a corporation that is hands-down best of its class," said Whittaker, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Its presence as a sponsor will give the Red Team a valuable advantage in the next race.

DARPA announced the date of the next Grand Challenge last week but, aside from confirming that the winner-take-all prize will be increased from $1 million to $2 million, released little else. Details such as the location, rules and duration of the race won't be revealed until Aug. 14 when the agency has a participants' conference in Anaheim, Calif.

DARPA, the Pentagon's research and development arm, sees the Grand Challenge as a way to spur technological innovation in autonomous vehicles, which all branches of the U.S. military are incorporating into their forces both on and off the battlefield.

The course for the first event was a 140-mile route from Barstow to Primm, Nev. Fifteen teams qualified for the event, but few got very far. Sandstorm went the furthest and the fastest, though it got stuck at a hairpin turn after completing only about seven miles of the desert course.

The inaugural event attracted interest from 106 teams and DARPA officials expect even greater participation in the next event.

Whittaker anticipates that not only the number, but the quality of the competitors will increase for the second race. Stanford University, for instance, will field a team this time led by Sebastian Thrun, head of its artificial intelligence lab and, until last fall, a CMU faculty member.

"The people who participated the first time will enjoy an advantage," said Thrun. But the second race will have fewer unknowns, so all of the teams will have a better idea of the hardware and software needed. Prior to the first race, he noted, it was unclear whether the vehicle would have to negotiate rough off-road terrain; the actual course turned out to be primarily over dirt roads and desert trails.

Thrun's team will buy its vehicle from a company that specializes in installing drive-by-wire systems in vehicles for disabled drivers. That will allow the team to concentrate on navigation software, he said.

Whittaker said Sandstorm is race-hardened, but the new Hummer offers advantages that could prove crucial.

The new H1, for instance, has locking differentials that can be engaged electronically, rather than mechanically as in Sandstorm. The ability to engage the locking differentials ---- which turn all four wheels at the same speed, preventing wheel spin ---- would have allowed Sandstorm to free itself of the berm on which it was stuck during the March race, Whittaker said.

Other sponsors, such as Boeing, Intel, Caterpillar, SAIC and Seagate, have signed on again, he said.

In contrast to last year, potential sponsors now are seeking out the Red Team.

"It's certainly like night and day," he said.

Richard Mason, a Rand Corp. analyst who used $35,000 in winnings from two appearances on the TV game show Jeopardy to finance his robot, had hoped that this year's effort would attract sponsors. The robot completed five miles of the course, the fourth best effort, and he has since reached a verbal agreement with one sponsor.

"We hope to move up out of the shoestring league and have a real budget this year," he said of his team, the Golem Group.

The longer lead time to the October 2005 race will help, Whittaker said, noting that Sandstorm began testing in the Nevada desert only a month before this year's race.

The refurbished Sandstorm is due back in Pittsburgh this week. Whittaker plans to test it and its updated navigation software later this month at the former LTV site in Hazelwood. He expects to have the new Hummer H1 operating autonomously by August.

Whittaker said the team hopes to have some sort of "milestone" event this fall ---- perhaps running a robot along a desert course behind human drivers, or an exhibition with other robots along desert trails in Nevada.

The team also plans to run in a race in March sponsored by the International Robot Racing Federation as a tune-up for the fall. "Of course, we're going to run flat-out in October 2005," he added.