Chip-maker Via Technologies has announced "The Prodigies" as the official team for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, an off-road race of robotic vehicles.
The Prodigies are two students, Nicholas Hoza, 15, and Christopher Medrzycki, 20, who built from the ground up a vehicle using Via EPIA Mini-ITX mainboard as the PC brain of the vehicle's navigation system. The vehicle can navigate on its own along rough off-road tracks.
The DARPA Grand Challenge offers $2 million in prize money to the winner. It is a race of fully-autonomous vehicles that race an off-road course along the Mojave desert in Southern California and Arizona, USA. The race is organized by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The first time the event was held in March 2004, none of the vehicles met the challenge.
"The DARPA Grand Challenge is the most exciting, fun, and challenging project I've ever participated in - knowing that I'm building something completely unique makes every small achievement exhilarating," said Nicholas Hoza, The Prodigies Team Captain.
"Via's line of Mini-ITX motherboards is a cost-effective solution for our 912 PC-Bot." says Thomas Burick, President of White Box Robotics. "Their low power consumption, powerful embedded processors, and all-in-one design afford our 912 robot advanced functions like vision-based navigation and object recognition. "
"The Mini-ITX form factor combined with an x86 architecture is an ideal solution for onboard processing in robotics applications," said Fred Nikgohar, CEO of RoboDynamics.