One year ago, the Red Team was scrambling.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Carnegie Mellon University's William "Red" Whittaker and the Red Team's Sandstorm vehicle during preparations for last year's DARPA Grand Challenge near Barstow, CA. Click photo for larger image. Related article What's new in Red Team hardware, software On the Net Red Team Racing Web site DARPA Grand Challenge site

Its entry in the inaugural Grand Challenge race for autonomous robots, a converted Humvee called Sandstorm, rolled over just days earlier while making an "S" turn during tests in the Nevada desert.

After a furious weekend of rebuilding, with replacement parts flown in from Pittsburgh, the team from Carnegie Mellon University packed up the vehicle and headed for Fontana, Calif., where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA. was conducting the qualification event for its $1 million race across the Mojave Desert.

Sandstorm breezed through the qualifier, winning the pole position. On race day, March 13, it went further and faster than its 14 competitors, but got hung up on a berm just seven miles into the 142-mile race, its wheels spinning helplessly.

And the team is still scrambling today.

"The game is on," said William "Red" Whittaker, the famed CMU robotocist and Red Team namesake. Last year, "you could win just by finishing," he said, but the size and strength of this year's competition suggests several teams likely will finish the 175-mile race within the 10-hour limit set by DARPA.

So that means Whittaker, a former Marine, is keeping the pressure on his team of roughly 50 people -- ranging from student volunteers to full-time professional engineers -- as it attempts to field two vehicles for the Oct. 8 race.

A western contingent, testing Sandstorm at the Nevada Automotive Test Center, last month dropped a new turbodiesel engine into the vehicle, after its original 19-year-old engine seized up. Last week, fighting the cold and the swirling snow at the former LTV site in Hazelwood, some of the team's eastern contingent got their new entry, a modified H1 Hummer called H1ghlander, to take its autonomous baby steps, driving itself slowly through a set of traffic cones.

And those who aren't operating the vehicles themselves are busy developing and testing new software and sensor arrays. "This spring is about technology development," Whittaker explained. "I'm not sentimental," he added, noting no device or idea is held sacred at this point. "I'm not averse to getting out the wrenches and unbolting things."

DARPA has received applications from 195 teams for this year's event, which once again will be in the southwestern United States. That field will soon be slashed, however. Those who pass DARPA's initial muster will receive site visits in early May -- their vehicles will have to negotiate a short demonstration course -- and only 40 of those will be invited to a qualification event that begins in late September. Of those, no more than 20 will qualify for the race.

"Any team that did well last year -- CMU, Caltech, TerraMax [the Oshkosh Truck team] -- has to be considered a frontrunner," said Richard Mason, whose independent Golem Group team was one of the top four finishers last year.

Many of the teams have picked up additional sponsors for this year's race. The Red Team, which lacked an automotive sponsor last year, now has AM General, the manufacturer of military Humvees and civilian Hummers, on board. The company has provided the H1 Hummer used to build H1ghlander, as well as a backup H1.

"Of the new teams that weren't around last year, Stanford [headed by former CMU computer scientist Sebastian Thrun] is probably the one to watch," added Mason, whose team this year is allied with UCLA.

"I think there will be a number of serious contenders this year," agreed John Schwartz, spokesman for Team TerraMax. For this year's race, Oshkosh broke with Ohio State University, its ally last year, to team with Rockwell Collins, a maker of aircraft autopilot systems.

DARPA, the research and development arm of the Pentagon, is sponsoring the Grand Challenge to spur innovation in autonomous vehicles, which military officials expect will play increasingly large roles both on and off the battlefield.

This year's event boasts a $2 million prize for the winner, but many of the team sponsors, such as TerraMax's Oshkosh and the Red Team's Boeing, clearly see the bigger prize as being future contracts with the Defense Department.

Oshkosh, which makes military trucks, is dedicated to winning the race, Schwartz said, but also is determined to develop a "bolt-on" kit that could convert a wide array of military vehicles into self-driving vehicles.

Competitors had little more than a year to prepare for the first race and, with the exception of the Red Team, most had little opportunity to field test their vehicles. The 15-ton TerraMax, for instance, was stymied just more than a mile into the race by a bush that, to its sensors and computers, somehow looked impassable.

This year, TerraMax has logged more than 100 miles of autonomous driving and will undergo round-the-clock reliability testing in the three months running up to the race, Schwartz said.

The Golem/UCLA team likewise has had its truck out on last year's Mojave race course a number of times.

The Red Team's Sandstorm, meanwhile, has already logged more than 1,200 miles of autonomous driving. H1ghlander remains a work in progress, though it was built with a number of "drive-by-wire" systems that didn't exist when Sandstorm's chassis was assembled in 1986 and that provide some opportunities for a vehicle controlled by electronics rather than humans.

Come summer, the Red Team will shift from technology development and focus on field testing and improving reliability. But for now, the team is concentrating on making the cut as teams are thinned out.

"It's not enough to do your best on race day," Whittaker said. "First, you have to get to the race."