Stanley wins the Grand Challenge
The Stanford team's vehicle covered 212 kilometres of desert track in 6 hours 53 minutes; five of twenty-three finalists completed the course.
Why it matters
Autonomous driving went from twelve kilometres to the full route in eighteen months, and Google's self-driving project grew out of this team.
Stanley relied on laser rangefinders for the near field and a camera for the far one, with traversability parameters tuned by learning from recordings of human driving rather than by hand-set thresholds. Thrun went on to lead Google's self-driving car project, and part of the team founded companies in the field. The race showed that a prize competition moves a field faster than grants do.