INDY ROBOT RACING PURSUES MILLION-DOLLAR GLORY, BILLION-DOLLAR PAYOFF

INDIANAPOLIS ? A century ago, it was the unchallenged center of transportation innovation. The Indianapolis 500, a 2.5-mile test track carved out of 328 acres of low-yield farmland, forever sealed Indiana as the home of high-tech speed.

Today, in the innovative Indy tradition, a new tech-laden racing vehicle takes shape a couple dozen miles from the famous 500 oval. While Indy bred, though, it?s a different type of vehicle for a different type of race.

The top prize for this particular race ? the second ?grand challenge? ? is a cool $2 million from DARPA, the kazillion-dollar defense research agency. To take the checkered flag, the Hoosier entry has to grind through at least 175 miles in 10 hours.

Just 175 miles in 10 hours? On a bad day, your elderly in-laws packed in a 1965 Chevy could do that. Even in 1911, the legendary Ray Harroun (minus a riding mechanic in his six-cylinder Marmon Wasp) pounded out 500 miles on the Indy bricks in less than seven hours at a then-blazing speed of 74 miles per hour.

To qualify for this race, though, there?s just one little catch: You can?t have a driver. Your vehicle has to be completely automated. The race track? The hellish California Mojave Desert. Boiling temperatures. Ten-ton boulders lurking behind sagebrush. Sand pits that would make a Hummer beg for mercy.

From a technology perspective, it?s gruesome stuff.

Nearly 200 teams from four countries originally signed up for the 2005 race and that figure has already been cut nearly in half. After the remaining teams strut their auto-tech wares during DARPA site visits over the next couple months, the team figure will be down to the 40 best, which will all head out West to do battle with the desert in October.

And all of this for high-tech racing glory? Hardly.

The Pentagon wants a third of all U.S. military vehicles to be completely automated by 2015. That will take some serious dough. It?ll take something like $100 billion worth of dough ? yes, billion ? for research and the commercialization of rugged, automated vehicles that can cheerfully wade into enemy territory and wreak organized havoc without risking U.S. troops.

With a digital straight face, the Web site of Indy Robotics includes this blithe statement on its home page: ?Our goal is to recreate Indiana?s glory days when it was the hotbed of advanced vehicle development in the early 1900s.?

If you believe that, you might also be interested in buying a new set of muffler bearings.

More believable ? and of potential extreme interest to people who like to make money on technology investments ? is a later statement by Indy Robotics: ?Our primary objective is to build a successful company [that provides] autonomous robots to military and commercial markets. The DARPA Grand Challenge is the forum in which to prove our technology.?

A ?successful company?? Try $100 million in expected revenues from this little Hoosier venture.

?We?re confident we have the pieces in place to take Indy Robotics to that level,? said John Layden, an entrepreneur and co-leader of Indy Robot Racing. Layden, whose current resume reads like a Fortune 100 wish list, says the real work begins when Indy Robotics gets done with the DARPA Grand Challenge.

But before Layden and millionaire Hoosier entrepreneur Scott Jones (who holds a fistful of voice mail patents and chairs his own stable of national high-tech companies) can start dreaming of robotic IPOs, much work has to be done.

The most successful automated DARPA challenge vehicle to date ? cobbled together by serious brainpower from the venerable Carnegie Mellon University ? only traveled a little more than seven automated miles before catching fire. Every DARPA excursion to date has ended with the ubiquitous phrase: ?The vehicle was command disabled,? which means it was shut down before it blew up.

To bring high-tech racing glory (and a new billion-dollar company) back to Indiana, an all-Hoosier team of industrial engineers, scientists and patent holders are packing a 2005 Jeep Rubicon with 40 high-speed laptops, two NAVCOM independent GPS systems, advanced sensor fusion for obstacles, state-of-the-art RADAR and SONAR arrays and enough lines of code for motion control that would stop a clock.

This race likely won?t start with Layden and Jones speaking that famous phrase: ?Gentlemen, start your engines.? Given the extreme jarring potential of a multi-ton Jeep flying through unforgiving desert terrain, it will be more like: ?Fellow entrepreneurs, shut down your hard drives.? RAM processing power and sophisticated memory-resident databases will direct this automated race car.

The October outcome for the Indy team? While not worried about finishing in first place, Layden claims: ?We?re confident we?ll complete the course. After we finish, we will have demonstrated product concept and we?ll be ready to start taking that concept to market.?

And the forthcoming Indy Nasdaq million-dollar moniker? With apologies to Issac Asimov, we may be seeing ?IROBOT? sooner rather than later.

Michael Snyder is principal of The MEK Group, a marketing and business development consulting firm that provides communications-driven strategies to increase market share, enhance productivity and build distinctive brand awareness. Snyder can be reached at msnyder@themekgroup.com.

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