Call it a giant leap for machinekind.

On Saturday, when Carnegie Mellon's robotic Chevy Tahoe, known as "Boss," rolled across the finish line of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge in Victorville, Calif., after 60 miles of urban driving, no driver stepped out to be showered with champagne and photographs. In fact, Boss had flawlessly accomplished the 19 missions given to the 11 finalist robots in the competition–parking at precise locations, negotiating a mix of onroad and offroad driving, and avoiding the other robotic and manned cars that roamed the streets of an abandoned airforce base–all without a human behind the wheel.

"This is a wonderful day in the history of robotics," Carnegie Mellon team leader Red Whittaker said after the race. "It's as good as it gets."

Finishing in under six hours, Carnegie Mellon's robotic SUV edged out "Junior," Stanford's autonomous Volkswagen  Passat, by around 20 minutes to win the race's $2 million top prize. Trailing them to the finish were four other driverless cars, whittled down from the 35 teams of ambitious roboticists that were invited to Victorville for the event sponsored by DARPA.

The performance of those six auto-bots marks a new height in humanless feats: Though Stanford's autonomous Touareg "Stanley" won a 132-mile unmanned sprint across the Mojave Desert in 2005, that event's bots merely had to stay on the road. In this year's race, entrants confronted complex intersections and traffic, a situation that seemed destined to end in a high-tech demolition derby.

But fans looking for robot-on-robot violence were disappointed. Stacked with laser scanners, radar, cameras and loads of processing power, the race's robots nimbly avoided each other. Only one minor collision occurred about four hours into the race, when MIT's confused Land Rover crunched the tail end of Cornell's autonomous Tahoe.

That's not to say every bot was on its best behavior: The University of Central Florida's robot confused a driveway for a road, parking itself at an abandoned house. The German team CarOLO's robot veered into a ditch and had to be dug out and towed. And the event's largest competitor, an 11-foot-tall, 12-ton robotic truck built by Oshkosh Trucks, called "Terramax," was pulled from the race after it screeched to a halt just inches from plowing into a concrete pillar.

In the eyes of Stanford's team leader, Sebastian Thrun, all of those robotic mishaps prove that the world is still years away from driverless autos. "I'm positively enthused that this race has a winner," he said. "But we're witnessing the painful birth of a new technology, and this is the first of many hours of labor."

Thrun wasn't completely satisfied with the near-perfect driving of his team's own robot, Junior, despite its second-place performance, earning the team $1 million. He pointed out an incident when Junior deftly pulled in front of a line of a row of obstacle cars waiting at a stop light. Ideally, Thrun explained, Junior ought to have patiently waited behind them. "It was certainly a safe maneuver," he said with a smile. "But it was clearly impolite."

Determining when to wait behind another car in traffic and when to steer around a stalled vehicle is just the sort of subtle problem that DARPA aims to solve in its robotics competitions. The Urban Challenge is part of the agency's mission, set out by Congress, to make one-third of all military operational vehicles unmanned by 2015.

To spark the innovation necessary to reach that goal, DARPA launched its series of robotic races in 2004. Hundreds of roboticists have since risen to the agency's challenge, entering bots built from sports cars, motorcycles, even their wives' minivans. Some come seeking glory and academic achievement, while others are looking for lucrative contracts with the military and private industry. Building one of these robots is a big effort. The Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon, for instance, has more than 30 members, and corporate sponsors including General Motors  Caterpillar , Continental  and Google.

Even so, Saturday's event marks a turning point, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology's team leader, Jonathan How. "I honestly don't think that a lot of people expected any of the teams to finish [Saturday]," he says. "The fact that six teams did demonstrates that this technology is really quite mature, and well on its way to becoming a reality."

And Carnegie Mellon's Red Whittaker is already imaging what the next big DARPA-sponsored event could involve–perhaps a 24-hour race of robotic cars through snow and rain, or maybe team racing with coordinated convoys of driverless cars. And if those kinds of challenges don't sound daunting enough, Whittaker's immediate term goals are even more ambitious: He's currently assembling a team to make a grab for a $20 million prize, sponsored by Google, to put the first privately owned vehicle on the moon.

"Every well-designed challenge always seems just a little beyond what's possible," Whittaker says. "Only when it's over do you get the sense that there was really nothing to it."

Source : Economic Times

As the airline passenger traffic is projected to grow at 19% annually, Indian cargo market is expected to grow at 24% per annum for the next 5 years. Moreover, 91% of Industry players are bullish about the India’s growth story. Companies like Air India, Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines, Indigo, and GoAir have collectively ordered 300+ aircrafts since 2005 and have handled 106.97 thousand aircraft movements (excludes General Aviation movements), 9.37 million passengers and 142.42 thousand tonnes of freight since April 2007-August 2007 (Source-AAI Web).

All these developments have got the GOI (Government of India) mind rolling and to overcome the rising infrastructural bottlenecks, Ministry of Civil Aviation and AAI have decided to build 35 ‘Non-metro Greenfield airport projects’ to handle passenger and cargo traffic by 2010.

Besides Infrastructure projects, Ministry & AAI are bringing in World-class Supply Chain Mgt. and Logistics Handling practices to its Airport facilities for greater, improved and systematic baggage handling. IGIA (Indira Gandhi Int. Airport), plans to implement RAR (Regulated Agent Regime) and C-TPAT for obtaining Operational & Security competence in cargo handling.

Where RAR advocates Cargo receiving, handling and loading operations, C-TPAT deals with Cargo security through GSA, GHA, and Airline & Freight Forwarder participation. Complementary to the above case, AAI plans to introduce Robotics & RFID to ramp up baggage handling operations at 4 metro airports by 2009. AAI is in talks with leading IT software makers to provide Baggage Handling Mgt. systems & Ground Handling Agents (GHAs) for RFID Hardware.

This complete development involves a sunrise opportunity for SME hardware manufacturers as most of the RFID equipment is expected to be domestically procured.