FACTBOX: Five facts about robot car racing

(Reuters) - Following are five facts about the robot car races sponsored by the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.

-- The U.S. Defense Department has hosted three races for completely self-controlled robotic vehicles, including off-road races in 2004 and 2005 and the six-hour, 60-mile (100-km) Urban Challenge in 2007. www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/

-- The cost to Urban Challenge finalists ranged from $150,000 in equipment (plus a 1996 Subaru and plenty of unpaid labor) to well over $1 million. Entrants own their discoveries.

-- Competitors called the Urban Challenge chiefly a problem of artificial intelligence, since robots have to make so many driving decisions on their own, while previous races were more about developing good instruments and software to interpret them.

-- The Volkswagen Passat from Stanford University which finished the course first has approximately 100 times the processing power of Passats straight off the assembly line (which have about three to four dozen microcontrollers), one Volkswagen AG engineer estimated.

-- The only team to finish the final race that did not get a $1 million development grant from DARPA was "Little Ben", a project of the University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University, with backing from Lockheed Martin Corp. www.benfranklinracingteam.org