In scene that smacked of deja vu for Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, a driverless Hummer rolled over near Carson City, Nev., late Monday afternoon as it practiced for the upcoming $2 million Grand Challenge race.

	Carnegie Mellon University
	Carnegie Mellon University's H1ghlander, a modified H1 Hummer, rests on its roof after rolling over during a practice late Monday afternoon near Carson City, Nev.

"It hit a berm, dug in on the driver's corner, then spun and rolled," team leader William "Red" Whittaker reported in an e-mail sent to team members at 1 a.m. yesterday.

The vehicle, a heavily modified H1 Hummer dubbed H1ghlander, landed on its roof, shattering a fiberglass dome that houses its main navigation sensors.

Work began immediately to repair the vehicle, one of two that the Red Team has entered in the Oct. 8 Grand Challenge, a robotic race across 175 miles of the Mojave Desert sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The qualification event for the race will begin one week from today at California Speedway in Fontana, Calif.

Much the same thing happened last year, as the Red Team prepared for the inaugural Grand Challenge. During a test run at the Nevada Automotive Test Center, the former military Humvee called Sandstorm made a steering error in an S-curve and rolled over, wiping out its roof-mounted sensors.

The team had only a long, fevered weekend to rebuild Sandstorm and prepare for the qualifying event. The vehicle nevertheless breezed through the qualifier, earned the pole position and ultimately went the farthest of any vehicle in the race.

Michele Gittleman, Red Team project manager, said the team members aren't nearly as flustered by this year's accident as last year's.

"I think everyone's still feeling good," she said, noting the team already had been working on a round-the-clock schedule and had a number of spare parts at the ready.

And, in contrast to last year, the team has two vehicles, not just one. Sandstorm is also entered in the race and, despite a run-in with a tree branch that broke its sensor dome during a test run last week, remains at the ready.

DARPA is sponsoring the robot race, which will begin and end outside of Primm, Nev., in hopes it will lead to innovations in autonomous ground vehicles. The Defense Department hopes self-driving vehicles will become a key technology for the Army in the next decade.

Monday's accident occurred late in the afternoon as Sandstorm and H1ghlander reached mile 141 of a long-distance tandem run. Sandstorm was running well at the time, but stopped so team members could right H1ghlander.

Few details about the accident or repair efforts were available yesterday. Whittaker was in California to make a presentation at NASA's Ames Research Center and the Nevada crew was in "field team blackout," Gittleman said.

But Whittaker had expressed no doubts that H1ghlander would be ready for the qualifying event, she noted.

"Red would not say we would be racing with H1ghlander if we were not going to be racing with H1ghlander," she said.