After foraging through thousands of couches in Washington, the government has come up with $3.5m in prize money for the contestants in an upcoming robotic vehicle race.

DARPA - the gadgety arm of the Defense Department - today revealed that contestants in the 2007 Urban Challenge will receive prize money after all. New legislation had blocked the agency from offering cash awards as it had in the past two Challenge events. Now, however, Ken Krieg, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, has approved the payoffs.

DARPA's Challenge events remain popular with the geek set.

Last year, a Stanford University team won the second running of the Grand Challenge by completing a 150-mile desert journey. Stanford's success helped redeem the Grand Challenge contest after a complete collapse by all participants during the first event in 2004.

The most successful teams have largely relied on hefty equipment donations from vendors and have produced vehicles that cost well over $1m. Still, the cash prize is a nice incentive.

The government takes the robotic vehicle contest very seriously as the US has set a mandate to have one-third of its military ground vehicles operate unmanned by 2015. The Feds turned to the Grand Challenge concept after military contractors were slow to show much progress with the technology. ®

Related stories

• Diary of a human Living with robots: The $3.5m DARPA Urban Challenge (3 November 2007)
• MoD opens urban-warfare compo (15 March 2007)
• RoboBiz Carnegie Mellon's robotics whiz oddly trapped in the past (21 June 2006)
• Feds ready to send robotic car army to the streets (2 May 2006)
• Lizard Army fuses woman with black helicopter (4 November 2005)
• Stanford wins the DARPA challenge (10 October 2005)
• DARPA picks 40 robot hopefuls for $2m race (7 June 2005)
• US compute labs in desperate need of Federal swill (10 November 2004)
• DARPA figures out how to run a $2m robot race (3 August 2004)
• Crash test dummies get date for DARPA Robot Run II (10 June 2004)
• DARPA doubles cash payout for second robot race (17 May 2004)
• DARPA's Grand Challenge proves to be too grand (13 March 2004)
• Final robot grunts picked for $1million DARPA race (12 March 2004)
• $1 million Grand Challenge map leaked on Web (5 January 2004)
• DARPA quells robot road rage (31 December 2003)
• Could Segways replace soldiers as hired killers? (8 December 2003)
• DARPA chisels little guy out of $1 million race (16 November 2003)