If you squint, but really academic incentive structures are such that this isn't an attractive bet. There's really no scenario where you can shoot for the $100 million without getting interim funding from grant agencies. And if that's what you're doing, you'll need to publish and conduct research in the usual way. Which begs the question, if everyone shooting for the $100 million is doing research as usual, what's the $100 million really incentivizing?
The DARPA grand challenges recognized that this incentive structure doesn't work well. What they did instead was they held 3 smaller prizes instead of one large one. This meant that development was incremental over 5 years, which they also funded.
What they did in those 5 years was take driverless cars from running off the road into rocks in the middle of the desert in 2003; to converging on an architecture that could reliably navigate an urban environment by 2007, an architecture which is now the basis for all commercial driverless car efforts. If they had offered just a single lump sum for a demonstration of such a car, I think the entire industry wouldn't be where it is today.
The DARPA grand challenges recognized that this incentive structure doesn't work well. What they did instead was they held 3 smaller prizes instead of one large one. This meant that development was incremental over 5 years, which they also funded.
What they did in those 5 years was take driverless cars from running off the road into rocks in the middle of the desert in 2003; to converging on an architecture that could reliably navigate an urban environment by 2007, an architecture which is now the basis for all commercial driverless car efforts. If they had offered just a single lump sum for a demonstration of such a car, I think the entire industry wouldn't be where it is today.