Robots meet desert challenge

Somewhere in the Mojave desert a six-wheel robot truck called TerraMax has been trundling across the sand for more than 24 hours. Should TerraMax complete the 132-mile course, it will join the four robots to have met part of the Pentagon's challenge: to negotiate, unaided, a man-made obstacle course across the desert.

But TerraMax will have failed in the other part of the challenge: to finish in less than 10 hours. The robot vehicles were competing in a Pentagon-sponsored competition funded by the taxpayer with a prize of $2m (£1.3m) for the fastest robot to perform within the timeframe.

The prize was expected to go to a team whose Volkswagen, named Stanley, completed the course in less than seven and a half hours on Saturday.

While the US military uses some robot vehicles in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have to be remotely controlled by a nearby human. The hope is to develop vehicles capable of delivering supplies and performing other duties without the oversight of a human, with the ultimate aim to comply with a congressional mandate to have a third of all military ground vehicles unmanned by 2015.

Last year none of the teams completed the challenge. The course this year was tougher: as well as ravines and a dry lake bed, the vehicles had to go through three tunnels designed to knock out their satellite positioning equipment.