The U.S. military wants to build vehicles that can drive themselves through traffic, so it has issued 10 grants, each for $1 million, to design vehicles for the Urban Challenge in November 2007.

Raytheon Missile Systems and the University of Arizona are part of Team Scorpion, one of 10 teams selected from a field of 60.

Also on the team are Tucson’s Preferred Chassis Fabrication, Tucson Embedded Systems and iRobot of Burlington, Mass.

The UA engineers are led by professors Larry Head and Jerzy Rozenblit.

Team members can program the vehicle to be “smart” but won’t be able to coach it remotely, according to a UA news release.

The event will take place at an undisclosed location in the Southwest and is meant to simulate urban traffic the robot might encounter in a war zone.

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