X Prize

Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center and Robotics Institute is one to demonstrate its competitive nature and technical prowess.

  • In 2004 they traveled the farthest in the premiere DARPA Grand Challenge.
  • Their robots placed second and third in the 2005 run.
  • They’re trying it again this October at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.
  • Now, the X Prize foundation has thrown a slab of bloody meat in front of this Pit Bull and dared it to put a robot on the moon.

Professor and CMU Robotics Patriarch William “Red” Whittaker announced that CMU would be competing for the $20M X Prize for landing and driving a robot on the moon. “Planetary exploration is a dream we pursue and a technology we create,” said Whittaker, “We have spent decades building and testing robotic technologies for just this purpose.”

[Go Red Team!! --Ed.]

Press Release:

The world is abuzz with today’s news that Google will back the Lunar X Prize. The $30M prize money is broken out into a $20M Grand Prize, $5M Second Prize, and $5M in bonus prizes. The offer is good through 2012 after which the grand prize will drop to $15M through 2014. After that, the bet’s off unless Google wants to extend it.

To win the Grand Prize, a team needs to land a spacecraft on the moon and drive around for at least 500 meters, and send back “specific” video and images to earth. For second place, a team needs to land a robot, drive around on the moon, and send back some data. Bonus prize money will be given based on the performance of some bonus tasks such as finding water ice or man-made artifacts such as Apollo stuff.

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