[zumbojo]

Nova did an excellent (and surprisingly technical) episode [1] on the 2005 race mentioned in this piece, including Thrun's Stanford team. It was especially impressive as a triumph of Thurn's software-based approach over several of the other veteran teams that relied heavily on complex hardware (e.g., those teams used camera gimbals while Thrun's team just compensated for camera bumps using code).

For those of you on Netflix, it's available as a streaming video [2], and I highly recommend it.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/ [2] http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race-Nova/700...