I'm sure it never occurred to anyone on these teams to try out their code in a simulated environment. I'm 100% positive their development model was to crash car after car after car until they got it working. I can only imagine how expensive some of those bug hunts got.

Come on, seriously?

ya, srsly. From what I've seen they are hacking together the hardware and then constantly updating the code to get just barely working solutions, oftentimes in the middle of the testing. If some teams are running a fairly complex car physics simulator with simulated input from each of the types of sensors they are using this would be the first I've heard of it.

30 seconds on Google:

http://www.torctech.com/company/news/jaus-standard-emerges-d...

thanks calambrac. obviously I didn't look hard enough.

that presumes an unreasonable amount of homogeneity in both the programming languages of the entrants and the sensor platforms of their vehicles. The entrants may very well do that inhouse for testing purposes, but since Darpa is merely responsible running the competition and determining if the prize award is merited, why on earth would they do something that would unduly constrain the entrants?

They've successfully navigated in the real world, so I'd say yes.