無人運転

If you know me, you will know I rarely talk about cars. But over the weekend, I came across this program on PBS, The Great Robot Race, which is basically a competition to challenge people to design a car that will drive itself for over 130 miles of obstacles-filled desert terrain without any human control. The people in the competition has no knowledge of how the path is going to look like or the type of obstacles that will be placed. The route map was handed to them 2 hours before the competition for them to program it in to the car's control system they designed. They still have no ideas whether the path is narrow or what obstacles are along the way coming into the competition. They have to be ready for anything! Once the programming time is up, all they can do is to let the car drives itself and sit back and watch it on the screen, for the first time. I think some 30 teams qualified for the final real run but in the end, it was really a competition between the Blue (Stanford) and the Red (Carnegie Mellon) teams. It's so amazing to watch especially when one car passed the other towards 2/3 of the route. From the program, no only do you see how different teams approached the challenge and what ideas they came up with, but what impresses me most is how the different leadership style between the Blue and Red team (oh, and the guy who decided to enter the competition using a motor bike that can self-balance and make sharp turns). I am sure there were equally brilliant minds in both teams but when under very different leadership style, the work behavior and outcome can be very different. I can see I am more like the leader in the Red Team but it's really the leadership in the Blue team that is more superior and opened my eyes.

Try to catch this program if you get a chance. I promise it will not make you fall asleep. :-)

*You can actually watch the clips here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/program.html