Why We Compete

Georgia Tech

Simply put: we compete to win.

Georgia Tech is a young leader in robotics research and education, and the DARPA Urban Challenge is the toughest robotics competition in the world. As a first-time entrant, our strength in this competition is integration of disciplines-combining and deploying excellence! Our team combines the best and brightest from two of our nationally-ranked programs of research and study — computing and engineering. Our competition is tough, but we're confident we've brought the right combination of talent, technology, and innovative design to the Urban Challenge to beat even the most seasoned contenders.

The Urban Challenge is also an opportunity to put theory into practice and test our real-world driven research agenda in an important scenario — urban traffic. At Georgia Tech, we're focused on robotics and people — how we can use the technology to increase safety on the road, save more lives at war, and assist in everyday life through the use of personal and social robots.

SAIC

SAIC competes because competition brings out the best in people and ideas. In a marketplace that is largely saturated with "me too" people and companies, we are looking for the best and brightest who are willing to take a risk with new ways to address a challenge. These are the same folks who are attracted to the Urban Challenge.

Urban Challenge presents us with an opportunity to push our knowledge and deepen our expertise in autonomous vehicles, sensing, modeling and simulation; and develop new technologies that can be leveraged to the benefit of our company and customers.

Participating in the Urban Challenge gives the company an opportunity to show what it does best and demonstrate some of our capabilities to a national and international audience, and helps to put SAIC in the minds of young scientists and engineers as an employer of choice. Our participation also puts us in the minds of existing and potential customers as a focused and deliberate company that can take a set of seemingly insurmountable problems and overcome them.