I wanted to show a video to my undergraduate AI class about The DARPA Grand Challenge (a competition to design and build the best unmanned vehicles). After searching around, I quickly found "The Great Robot Race", a NOVA documentary on the 2006 DARPA Grand Challenge, that chronicles the stories of several competing teams. I thought the documentary was entertaining and offered great insight into the teams, how they are ran and the struggles they went through. Unfortunately, the AI that they did talk about was very brief and abstract; typical of a "mainstream" documentary.
In searching for supplemental material, I found a talk that Dr. Sebastian Thrun (Leader of the Stanford team that won the 2006 grand challenge) gave at Google, called "Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge." This talk, although similar in length to the NOVA documentary, gives great detail in the intelligent systems behind Stanley, the Stanford robot. As a result, this video is much more interesting from an artificial intelligence standpoint. After watching this talk, I decided I'll just show this to my class instead. Damn. I already paid $17 for the NOVA documentary on DVD.
On a side note, I don't know why some documentaries have to dumb the "meat" of the research so much. There was content covered in Thrun's talk that could easily be explained to a layman -- and wasn't. I wonder if I am incorrect in my faith for the common documentary viewer or the producers didn't feel like it was interesting. Who knows. I wonder how much interesting information I am missing when I watch documentaries outside of my area (E.g., ant documentaries).
Link: "The Great Robot Race" (NOVA)
Link: "Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge" (Dr. Sebastian Thrun)
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