But even if smaller teams like Cybernet have little chance of beating the favorites, the race still holds out the potential for a different kind of purse: lucrative contracts from the military and private industry.
Chuck Jacobus's 11-year-old minivan, for instance, may not perform perfectly, but Team Cybernet wants to prove it can retrofit its robotic technology onto any car, even the U.S. Army's aging fleet, whose vehicles Jacobus says are an average of 13 years old.