One of the television news mags — I think it was Dateline NBC,
because I seem to remember Stone Phillips’ smug visage — recently had a
little fantastical end-of-show segment about the possibility somewhere
down the line of robots eventually taking over humanity. They
interviewed some chap in England who’d implanted various microchips
under his skin all in the name of human betterment, and who was getting
ready to have a processor placed literally on his brain (hey, seems
like a good idea). They even interviewed the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising,
although he admitted his tome was tongue-in-cheek (way to sell your
book, jackass). All of this got me thinking, when watching The Great Robot Race on DVD, “Hey, these are probably the first-generation foot soldiers in our future enslavement!”

Directed by Joseph Seamans and narrated by John Lithgow, The Great Robot Race
runs just under an hour and chronicles the October 2005 DARPA Grand
Challenge, a race for robotic, driverless vehicles sponsored by the
Pentagon’s research agency. Twenty-three vehicles line up, with names
like Ghostrider, Terramax, Highlander and Stanley. The course is a
130-mile stretch of scorching Nevada terrain, and the cash prize is $2
million, with the unstated but no doubt the additional incentive of
possible dangled government contracts in unmanned warfare
investigation.

Interviews with writers from publications like Scientific American
help lend jargon-cracking insight to some of the terminology (hydraulic
steering assembly, inertial measurement unit and shift and brake
actuators), but for the most part the program does a savvy job of
explicating robotic sensors, apps and vision in layman’s terms, while
also focusing on the race’s hard-charging endowment personalities, like
Carnegie Mellon’s Red Whittaker and brothers Bruce and Dave Hall, the
guys behind Drillzilla on Battle Bots. There’s also footage
from previous races, wherein a “computer glitch” sends one contestant
hurtling off a short track and into a guard rail. (Sure. I blame
the two guys in red shirts lurking at the edge of the barrier; clearly
this robot has some bull in her.) All in all, this forward-looking Nova
special is intriguing (yes, there’s even a clip from The Terminator 2),
though the term “race” will be somewhat misleading to those expecting
brute-force sprints rather than technological marathons. Bring it on
robots, says I.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Great Robot Race is
presented in 1.85:1 widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, along
with an English language Dolby 2.0 audio track. The only supplemental
extras come in the form of DVD-ROM teaching materials in a downloadable
.PDF file — possibly all part of the robots’ master plan to isolate and
dominate the most technologically savvy of us. B (Movie) C- (Disc)