I remember when Star Wars first hit the big screen and America fell in love with R2D2 and C3PO. Reach even further back into pop culture trivia and you’ll find the robot from Lost In Space fame (“Danger, Will Robinson!”). We definitely have an ongoing fascination with robots, but can they actually drive a car?

Recently, I came across an article about a project that’s working toward accomplishing just that. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is apparently an arm of the federal government, scheduled safety tests just a few weeks ago on 30 computer-controlled vehicles in Southern California. The goal was to get these robotic cars, trucks and off-road vehicles to drive on their own in a city-like environment.

These tests precede something that I find absolutely amazing … robo-car races. That’s right. Races where there are no human drivers, just computer-controlled robotic vehicles. Pretty wild.

The last time this race was held in 2005, a team of robo-geniuses from Stanford University scored the checkered flag with a robotic VW they had nicknamed Stanley. Stanley the robo-VW beat out five other robotic vehicles on a 132-mile race across open desert.

This year, the new twist for this race will be a city street-type environment. These artificial intelligence vehicles will not only have to come to four-way stops, they’ll also be required to figure out which robo-car has right-of-way at that four-way stop. Again, completely wild.

According to Anthony Tether, the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA for short, “The response has really overwhelmed us. We’ve got people working day and night, putting their hearts and souls into this.”

Reminds me of about thirty years ago when huge, bulky machines called computers tried to make their first calculations. Who would have guessed back then that PCs would become so commonplace that practically every business and home has at least one? Just as computers evolved from unwieldy oddities to business essentials, I wonder if one day we’ll all simply say, “Stanley, take me to the office!”