Autonomy. Lawrence Burns

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      Whittaker scheduled one hundred days to actually get the robot assembled and the software built. The deadline fell in November, but as Thanksgiving approached, significant portions of the vehicle remained unfinished. The computers weren’t wired together, for example. Nor were the sensors mounted. The robot did have a name, though: Sandstorm, after the dust clouds the vehicle would kick up in the Mojave.

      Whittaker and Urmson both worried a lot about the Mojave Desert. They worried about the off-road conditions of the course, and the effects of the Mojave’s rutted roads on their sensitive sensors and microprocessors. Driven over even at moderate speed, the Mojave Desert’s rocks and ridges were bound to create vibrations that the students believed had the potential to damage the computer’s memory. After all, your basic disk drive is just a magnetic metal plate that spins really quickly. They’re encoded by a precise bit of metal that hovers just above the plate. Extreme shocks could see the metal stick gouging chunks from the spinning plate and damaging the drive. Those same bumps could create false readings from the sensors.

      Consequently, Red Team spent a lot of time determining how to insulate the computers and sensors from the jars and bumps that would happen as the Humvee drove across the desert. The solution, they decided, was to protect the equipment the same way automobile manufacturers insulated humans from bumps and jars. With springs and shock absorbers, which were fitted to an enormous metal box where the Humvee’s roof used to be. Dubbed the “e-box,” for electronics box, the 1,200-pound container didn’t just contain hard drives. It also encompassed much of the robot’s most sensitive equipment—the computers, the GPS system, the radar as well as the supplementary LIDAR units.

      The main LIDAR and the stereo-vision device still remained sensitive to the pitches and rolls that could strike the robot as it navigated the off-road trail. So the team spent untold hours engineering a device based on old nautical gimbals, complex series of interconnected arms and pivots that kept a ship’s compass stable in even the heaviest of seas. Part of the Red Team designed and built their own gimbal, mounting inside it the main LIDAR and the stereo-vision system, and protecting it all in a sphere a little larger than a classroom globe. Little motors in the gimbal allowed Sandstorm to direct the LIDAR and camera wherever it needed to sense the world. Heading into what its onboard map told it was a leftward curve, the LIDAR would “look” to the left so that it could see the world in the direction of the world to come.

      As technical director, Urmson was the one in charge of putting all these pieces together. He felt enormous pressure both at home and on the Red Team. That September, his wife had just had the couple’s first child, a baby boy. But Urmson couldn’t spend much time at home. He had made a promise to Whittaker that the robot would drive itself the entire length of the race, 150 miles, by midnight on December 10, 2003—three months before race date.

      To meet that deadline he was working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week; during one furious round of assembly Urmson didn’t sleep for forty hours. The week before Thanksgiving, Whittaker added to the pressure. “This vehicle hasn’t rolled so much as a foot under its own control,” he said during one meeting with Urmson and other key team members, according to the journalist Wayt Gibbs. “You have promised to get 150 miles on that beast in two weeks … Anyone who thinks it is not appropriate for us to go for 150 miles by December 10, raise your hand.” Silence. Not a single person elevated an arm. Whittaker smiled, according to Gibbs, and made an observation in his characteristically florid language: “We’re now heading into that violent and wretched time of birthing this machine and launching it on its maiden voyage.”

      The assembly work happened in a big garage in Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics building. Envision the best mechanics shop you’ve ever seen, and you’ll be close to this workspace. The ceiling is a few stories tall, with gangways and a small-scale version of a crane, the better to lift heavy objects. Lathes and drill presses, drawers full of every implement imaginable, as well as computer diagnostic equipment—every available horizontal surface features tools. It is the kind of place where you could literally make almost anything.

      The venue would host Urmson and the members of his team pretty much nonstop through that Thanksgiving weekend. By the end of it, enough computers were wired together, and enough sensors mounted, that Sandstorm felt like it was coming alive. It was around this period that the team found the perfect place to test their Frankenstein’s monster. There weren’t many spots with convenient access to the CMU campus where a 5,000-pound, exhaust-snorting, diesel-gulping, oil-dripping robot could push the limits of its abilities without risking civilian fatalities. It was Mickey Struthers, the postman volunteer, who thought of the solution. One day while he was driving over Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge on the way to Carnegie Mellon, Mickey noticed the lights along the shores of the Monongahela River twinkling in the cool evening air. All except for a vast swathe of dark shoreline to the right of the bridge. Mickey knew that was industrial land that had once housed Pittsburgh’s last steel mill, the LTV Coke Works, which had closed in 1998. Since then the land had sat fallow.

      Struthers suggested the site to Whittaker, who loved the idea for both its convenience as well as its industrial heritage. The 168-acre land parcel housed a railroad roundhouse and numerous outbuildings and equipment that made it seem as though it was left over from the industrial revolution, connecting the team to the same brawny spirit that had built Pittsburgh so many decades ago. With a few phone calls to the wealthy family foundations that owned the land, Whittaker arranged for the team to test there.

      On the second of December, the team took the first of what would become many test runs at the Coke Works. The distressed location with its spent oil cans and rusted industrial detritus seemed appropriate for the ancient-looking Humvee, which just in general seemed to have more in common with a Jurassic-era dinosaur than one of the most innovative mechanical devices ever assembled. Snow covered the ground. The temperature was eighteen degrees. “Just like the Mojave Desert, huh?” shouted one team member, according to a Wired article. (Whittaker, meanwhile, was wandering around in a knit shirt, jeans and boots he wore without socks.) Urmson climbed aboard for the first run to manually hit the emergency stop button if the robot suddenly went crazy. The robot swerved toward a precipice when first activated, then settled and drove its course as expected. After a few uneventful laps Urmson decided, at 7:51 P.M., to see what would happen when he gave Sandstorm free rein. He clambered off the robot. The team programmed in a series of GPS waypoints that drew a dot-to-dot version of an oval. Not sure whether to breathe, the team watched the robot roll along its route for half an hour, ultimately accumulating four miles. No accidents. No incidents of any kind, in fact. They were nowhere near making their 150 miles yet, but that evening, it was difficult to deny they were progressing toward their goal.