American off-road vehicles will tackle some daunting homeland terrain: the asphalt jungles, clay embankments and alkali wastelands separating Los Angeles from Las Vegas. The ground is navigable -- the daunting part is that these vehicles must do it entirely without human help.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is sponsoring the DARPA Grand Challenge. The contestants will be "autonomous motor vehicles" that can drive and service themselves without human intervention, making all their own decisions. They must be able to navigate without help, even by remote control.

The winner's prize is a cool million in cash.

Entrants have a year to prepare for the event -- and they'll need it. Scheduled for March 13, 2004, entrants will pilot a 250- mile, four-wheel-drive course -- and they must do it in under 10 hours in order to qualify. According to DARPA, it will include "surfaced and unsurfaced roads, trails and off-road areas" with man-made and natural obstacles including ditches, open water, rocks, underpasses, construction and other vehicles.

Unlike, say, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle plowing through a Middle East desert, challengers will be required to traverse the course in an environmentally friendly way. Vehicles cannot tear up roads, dig large holes or clear paths by setting obstacles on fire.

Entrants attempting to gain unfair advantage by bombing competitors back into the manned-vehicle age will be disqualified.

"We're still pondering the right approach on the hardware end," said Richard Mason of the Caltech Robotics Group, whose team includes experts in path planning, machine vision, control theory and computer systems.

Mason also noted that designers will have to come up with the form for their entries by combining their individual areas of technological expertise.

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