Iridium will Provide Satellite Data Links to Track Unmanned
Vehicles in DARPA Grand Challenge
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
has selected Iridium Satellite to provide critical data
communications for tracking the unmanned vehicles competing
in the 2005 Grand Challenge, which gets underway this
weekend.
Forty-three teams have been invited to participate
in the National Qualification Event at the California
Speedway, September 28 to October 6. Twenty teams will
advance to the final Grand Challenge Event on October
8 in the Nevada desert.
NAL Research, an Iridium value-added manufacturer,
is supplying 56 Iridium data terminals to be installed
on the vehicles. Each device will transmit its location
every seven seconds to the host server, so the vehicle’s
movements can be monitored as it negotiates the difficult
terrain along the route.
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a field test designed
to stimulate research and development of autonomous
vehicle technology for future military applications.
During the race, each vehicle will be required to travel
approximately 175 miles over rugged desert terrain using
only onboard sensors and navigation equipment to find
and follow the route and avoid obstacles. The route
will not be announced until two hours before starting
time. DARPA will award a $2 million prize to the team
whose vehicle successfully completes the route with
the fastest time within the ten-hour time period. All
vehicles have been developed by private teams without
government funding. The 43 semifinalists were selected
from a field of 118 entrants around the country. The
purpose of the DARPA Grand Challenge is to help DARPA
develop technologies that will save the lives of American
fighting men and women on the modern battlefield.
NAL Research president Ngoc Hoang said, “It is
vitally important to be able to monitor the location
of the unmanned vehicles in real time as they maneuver
around the rugged desert roads and random obstacles
along the way. We provided a similar service during
last year’s Grand Challenge, and Iridium’s
short-burst data service proved to be a robust and reliable
solution for following the vehicles’ movements
along the route.”
Iridium executive vice president Greg Ewert said, “Asset
monitoring represents an important growth market for
Iridium. Our short-burst data service provides a dependable
and cost-effective solution for global, low-latency
vehicle tracking applications in remote regions of the
world.”
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19
December 2005 
