That's How It Happened

MONKEY + QUADBIKE + iBOOK = $$$$$

DARPA have announced the 2005 Grand Challenge. The challenge is to design and build an autonymous ground vehicle that can navigate 75 miles across the Nevada desert through a detailed series of GPS waypoints. This year the entrants mostly consisted of large robotic Hummers and 4x4s, none of which managed to get further than 7 miles. Lots never left the start line, and several went backwards, probably because it's tough to automate a full sized vehicle. Since the prize is 2 million dollars, I figure some innovation is needed to spice up the competition.
My design is of a highly trained orang-utan riding a quad bike, reading directions off a GPS equipped iBook. This relatively low tech solution seems sure to meet with success, after all animals as dim as pigeons are capable of steering missiles. I haven't found out where to order an orang-utan yet, but I have until December next year to train him up. I intend to start him off playing Grand Turismo and Colin MacRae Rally, before moving on to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
I haven't actually checked the rules to see if an orang-utan is eligible; if not I intend to pull a mechanical turk on the organisers, by concealing a smaller monkey, perhaps a marmoset in the engine housing.
Any offers of assistance welcome. I can't afford to pay my crack team of ape wranglers and geo-locational programmers, but I might cut you in for a couple of points from the profit, and maybe a coveted Gmail invite.

The slaves have been hard at work in the link mine:

A life sized replica of The Simpsons' House.

Bonsai Kitten is old hat, meet Bonsai Potato.

A tribute to Reagan in jellybeans; touches the heart.

CAD created homes for hermit crabs based on the designs of a fascist architect.

When London gets too gentrified I intend to move to Assloss or Twathats, just two of the many hilarious UK placenames in this compendium.

Although monkeys may rule at quadbiking they still suck at typing Shakespeare. The virtual simians of The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator have only managed 16 letters: King Richard II, which is much better than the typewriter equipped monkeys of Paignton Zoo who only: ""...succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s"." (via Rogue Semiotics.)