Cornell's self-driving vehicle performed beautifully in the DARPA Grand Challenge, as far as it went, but was eliminated after only nine miles of the course due to a software weakness, the team reported.

Stanford University won the competition's $2 million prize, completing the 132-mile course in 6 hours, 53 minutes. Only four other vehicles out of 24 entries completed the course.

The Cornell team reported on its Web site http://dgc.cornell.edu that "Titan," its modified Spider Light Strike military all-terrain vehicle, was performing perfectly until it was paused by the DARPA chase vehicle because it made a controlled sharp turn. The Spider's software causes it to slowly come to a stop when paused, and the timing of the pause was such that the Spider stopped with its wheels resting against a guardrail.

The team had prepared software that would enable the vehicle to back up, but it had not been enabled due to time constraints, so the vehicle was not able to back away from the guardrail and continue after the pause.

"The nine miles that the Spider did complete went exceptionally well, and the logs that we retrieved showed that all of its systems ran as they should have," the team reported.