Washington –- What would you do if you were given $1 million to build a robot vehicle that could drive at normal speed, park, avoid pedestrians and cars driven by professional racers, and obey traffic laws?

Virginia Tech University graduate student Jesse Farmer jumped at the chance to team up with other university students and engineers from TORC Technologies to do just that. The group worked frantically for three months to outfit a Ford Escape Hybrid with cameras, lasers, electronics, global positioning systems, computers and software for a four-hour robot car rally at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California.

The race -- called "Urban Challenge" -- was sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, a small organization that has been bringing together the best minds and great ideas for 50 years of innovation. Even though his team placed third, Farmer told America.gov he could not think of a “cooler project to ... work on.”

DARPA is focused on new research for military use, but through technology transfer many of the products and systems eventually find civilian use as well, such as global positioning systems.

The November 2007 race originally drew 89 prospective teams from nine countries: Austria, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Mexico and New Zealand -- each headed by a team leader living in the United States, as dictated by contest rules. The field of candidates eventually was winnowed down to 11 teams through inspections and trials.

This was the first time autonomous robot-driven vehicles interacted with human-operated cars in an urban environment. To further test the robot cars, DARPA staff stood ready to issue traffic tickets, which also counted as penalties against participants. Accidents and traffic jams ensued.

Judges watched via data link from an aircraft circling above, with multiple cameras focusing on each vehicle. DARPA asked Logos Technologies to adapt a technology that the intelligence community was using. Logos had three weeks to do it so judges could view instant video replay from various angles, which proved indispensable in resolving disputes.

Farmer’s team earned $500,000, second runner-up Stanford University took home $1 million, and first-place winner Carnegie Mellon University walked away with the $2 million jackpot.

"Urban Challenge" was the last of three similar agency-sponsored ventures. DARPA saw it as a way to see if a military convoy could navigate a city without human intervention. The race proved it possible.

A driverless vehicle is hardly an attractive target for a terrorist bomb and offers no incentive for hostage takers. Now, the military must follow up with a real-world application.

BRINGING VISION TO REALITY

DARPA has fostered stealth technology, body armor, night vision equipment and mini-unmanned aerial vehicles, which the U.S. Marines refer to as their “guardian angels.” It also collaborated with NASA to produce the Robonaut that merged a robot and a mobile platform designed by Segway.

DARPA Director Tony Tether recently guided the 240-person organization past its 50-year milestone. DARPA began in 1958, after the surprise Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite. President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to ensure the United States never again would be caught off guard technologically.

DARPA’s mission has broadened since then to incorporate ways to foster technological surprise against potential adversaries by demonstrating -- just as with Urban Challenge -- that new technical ideas are possible.

U.S. Senator John Warner says whole scale industries evolved following DARPA-funded research in photonics, information technology and microelectronics. DARPA’s drawing board also spawned the Saturn rocket that helped launch Apollo moon missions.

Tether told America.gov that DARPA takes steps to ensure the foreign sector is brought into its intellectual equation. “We do monitor worldwide what is going on. And it is actually easier to do that” now with the Internet, which DARPA launched, he said.

The director said his agency -- with a $3 billion-plus annual budget -- funds research around the world “mostly through universities” because the basic technologies they are exploring are the easiest to fund and working through universities avoids export control issues. Universities receive 15 percent of funding, while industry absorbs 80 percent.

How does DARPA deliver revolutionary technologies and ensure that the path to innovation does not go stale? Mainly by hiring great program managers, but also by allowing them to serve only four years to six years. “It is that rotation that has made DARPA as powerful as it is today,” Tether said, “I really believe that that’s what makes us different than any place else.”

WHAT NEXT?

“We can only imagine what the next 50 years will bring,” Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ventured, but the United States will continue to rely on DARPA “to dramatically move the frontier of technology rapidly forward in a way that we can put it to work in the field.”

DARPA will continue to explore ideas to give the United States unique capabilities. All its decisions are based on a national security rationale because, as Tether put it: “the ‘D’ in DARPA is always for defense.”