Way before Waymo, there was Dexter

Nearly 20 years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sponsored a contest that appealed to robotics-savvy students and professors. It challenged them to produce a self-guided vehicle capable of city driving—a glimpse toward today’s autonomous cars.

The DARPA Urban Challenge attracted an enthusiastic team of students and faculty from the Case School of Engineering, some of whom posed for this picture on a test track outside of Columbus in June 2007—five months before the competition.

Team Case had gotten hold of a used self-driving car, donated by ENSCO Inc. and designed for off-road driving. Team members added advanced sensors and biologicallyinspired robot control capabilities for on-road autonomous driving. The result was the Deployable EXtreme Terrain Enabled Robot, or Dexter.

Squat, seat-less and bristling with sensors, Dexter still had its charms. It made it to the challenge’s semi-finals in California, where it placed in the top 20. What’s more, the charismatic Caseys were featured in Robocars, a 2008 Science Channel documentary inspired by the challenge. Many went on to robotics-related careers.

Dexter retired to the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in University Circle, where an exhibit placard credits Team Case for “showing how important technology research is to the future of the automobile.”