Reliving the Grand Challenge (Video)

You know how you had to watch The Matrix I again just before Reloaded came out to psych and prepare yourself for an awesome sequel? Well, with the Urban Challenge - aka Grand Challenge II - right around the corner, we wanted to relive the moments of the Grand Challenge and found this awesome video series on the historic robotics contest here on PBS NOVA. If you are not familiar with it, PBS NOVA is an award winning and incredibly brilliant television series covering science and technology and it's broadcast in freely available media (public television and the Internet). Each of their one-hour television episodes has a dedicated web space like this one on the Grand Challenge. I watched the Grand Challenge episode for the first time online and it was great! They have mesmerizing aerial video of Stanley and Highlander racing through the Mojave Desert leaving dust in their wake, literally. Their coverage extends beyond the robot cars and into the planning and research spaces of the teams themselves, exposing the ultra-ambitious and competitive personalities of people like Sebastian Thrun and Red Whittaker. Sebastian Thrun is a professor at Stanford University and prior to moving to Stanford was a colleague of Red Whittaker, a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I highly recommend watching it (link again). Needless to say, I'm super psyched for the Urban Challenge now!

Holy molly! Not robotics related but super cool! PBS NOVA will air an episode on Secrets of the Samurai Sword soon too!