The Stanford team took home the $2 million jackpot. In all, five vehicles crossed the finish line, compared with none in the first event. What exactly enabled the winning teams to pull ahead of the others is hard to pinpoint. All the teams learned from studying the experience of the first Grand Challenge, according to Jackel, and knew what to expect the second time around. But it is impossible to ignore that the winning teams, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon, had received significant DARPA support for their robotics programs over the years.
