The Department of Defense's research arm, the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA), has announced their latest challenge: build a robotic car that can traverse through urban settings for 60 miles in 6 hours. The challenge is designed to encourage research for the development of autonomous ground vehicles for use on the battlefield.

In the 2005 challenge, several cars successfully drove autonomously 175 miles through the Mojave desert. This year, the challenge is to drive through city environments, including understanding street signals, and merging into traffic safely.

This picture shows last year's winner, Stanford University's VW Toureg vehicle, named "Stanley".

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