The Grand Challenge, a race between privately built robotic vehicles, ended without a winner today. The Department of Defense’s DARPA held the challenge as a fast and cheap way of advancing the field of unmanned autonomous vehicles for the military, but will have to parlay the $1 million prize to the next challenge in 2006. From photos, many of the vehicles look like stock SUVs fitted with a PC and several cameras where the driver would be, but the exceptions run the gamut. There are several compact designs apparently made from scratch, and many based on specialty vehicles like a sand dune racer, and a huge Oshkosh MTVR defense truck. The challenge of making a vehicle able to drive itself was well documented by Monster Garage’s Remote Control Car episode, but the Grand Challenge required vehicles to drive themselves. The teams were given two hours to program their robots with the race course’s hundreds of waypoints, beginning near Barstow, CA and ending near Las Vegas, NV, before letting them loose on the desert terrain. None of the vehicles got further than 7 miles within the 10 hour time limit of the race.