"Boss" couldn't have done better. Carnegie Mellon University's latest robotic vehicle - a 2007 Chevy Tahoe named after General Motors Research founder Charles F. "Boss" Kettering - nailed all its turns and obeyed traffic laws today at a test run to qualify it for the $2 million Urban Challenge in November. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency officials who will judge Boss's performance could not say for certain if the vehicle would make it through this elimination round - which will whittle competing vehicles worldwide from 53 to 30 - but were optimistic. "Boss behaved like a good beginning human driver," said Norm Whitaker, DARPA Urban Challenge Program Manager. "They did a real good job." Winners of the qualifying round will be announced in August. In the last two weeks of October, those vehicles will participate in one more qualifying round before the challenge, which DARPA created to spur technological development that will help keep humans off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The Urban Challenge is a 60-mile competition for autonomous vehicles that must negotiate stop-and-go traffic in an urban setting. Carnegie Mellon previously participated in DARPA's 2004 and 2005 desert-based Grand Challenges, but didn't win either.

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