BLACKSBURG -- When Ruel Faruque earned his master's degree in December, the mechanical engineering student said he had four job offers dangling "top secret space projects," roles in established organizations and salaries in the $65,000 to $70,000 range.

But Faruque opted for a newly created position with TORC Technologies, a small, two-year-old robotics development company in VT KnowledgeWorks, the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center's business incubator.

The job comes with a $50,000 salary, a small desk by the door and one very significant perk: the chance to work on Virginia Tech's Urban Challenge entry.

"It was the reason I came to TORC," Faruque said.

The Urban Challenge is a competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to accelerate the development of autonomous ground vehicle technologies. Participating teams work to develop, and race, vehicles that can travel a 60-mile course through traffic -- with no human driver and no remote control.

DARPA, the central research and development arm of the Department of Defense, has sponsored two previous challenges. In the most recent, in 2005, teams raced autonomous vehicles on a 132-mile desert course. Virginia Tech's entries finished eighth and ninth out of 25 by distance covered, and a team from Stanford University walked away with the $2 million prize.

For years, Faruque and TORC's three other new hires worked on similar competitions as Tech students, squeezing projects between classes and research assistant duties.

The hands-on experience gave them marketable skills, whet their appetite for careers in robotics and eventually landed them an opportunity few of their peers can boast.

"I'm getting paid to work on what I was essentially volunteering to do before," said Andrew Bacha, a recent TORC hire.

In the next nine months, TORC will work under subcontract to create the software to allow Tech's Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle to sense and react to its environment.

In hiring four recent graduates to do that, the eight-person company has kept local a pool of valuable knowledge -- and offered students the ability to move seamlessly from campus to corporate life.

"Most students don't get to do exactly what they did as students," said Charles Reinholtz, a mechanical engineering professor who is one of several faculty advisors for the competition. "Some don't want to, but these students got involved in this and have really committed themselves to it because it's fun for them."

TORC operates out of a small office suite around the corner from VT KnowledgeWorks, a tech-company incubator that launches and nurtures start-up companies like TORC.

There, company president and chief executive officer Michael Fleming said, TORC specializes in "accelerated development of cutting-edge robotics technology."

Of TORC's eight employees, four to five -- including all four new hires -- work on the Urban Challenge, as well as elements of the challenge entry that can be commercialized.

Other employees, Fleming noted, are working on the company's five other contracts, including a partnership with a nonprofit foundation to develop a female-looking spokesrobot that talks about keeping hearts healthy and one with a professional race team to develop an in-helmet wireless communication system.

In addition, TORC will release in March a wireless emergency stop system for experimental robotics projects. The product will be targeted for use in academic, government or industry applications.

All told, Fleming said the firm is set to gross more than $1 million in 2007, including payment from Tech.

As part of its subcontract agreement with the university, TORC receives $485,000 -- or roughly half of the seed money DARPA awarded to Tech's team -- plus the chance to earn almost $1 million more if the entry wins.

The initial money covers the new employees' salaries, and in so doing, it enabled TORC to double its workforce, Fleming said.

But for TORC, a fledgling firm that has yet to do any real marketing, the benefits of working on the Urban Challenge are more than just monetary.

Simply participating in the competition brings the company exposure that can lead to future contracts.

"DARPA has essentially challenged any team, university or company who wants to participate with one of the most difficult unmanned system programs ever," Fleming said. And "we're able to develop a lot of software algorithms that have applications elsewhere in the unmanned system community -- we have already had some large defense companies contact us and are extremely interested."

Thus far, most of TORC's work has come in through referrals -- many from Tech alums who went to school with Fleming and his colleagues and are now employed at larger companies.

Beyond the money and marketing, perhaps the biggest advantage the Urban Challenge carries is the chance to compete for employees who might otherwise look to better known and better paying companies.

Companies, like "your Boeings, your Lockheed Martins, your Northrop Grummans, your AAIs," Fleming said.

And, within the booming unmanned and autonomous vehicle industry, the demand for people with project know-how is high.

"We're always interested in people with this experience," said Brett Leedy, a design engineer with General Dynamics Robotics Systems who graduated from Tech in 2006. "Whenever you're talking about doing design and development with robots, you're talking about people who are not just mechanical engineers and not just electrical engineers."

Working on competitions requires using a variety of engineering applications, Leedy said, and "someone who has that type of experience starts with a leg up."

Jerry Lane, director of the Great Lakes office for Applied Research Associates, co-founded the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International in 1992.

He called the competition, and others like it, "fabulous recruiting resources."

"I told my boss, you could walk into there blindfolded and pick a winner," Lane said. "These competitions really bring out the best of the best."

Before TORC was founded, Reinholtz said he watched a number of Tech's best move out of the area for work.

"My feeling was, it would be really fun to have a company here that could hire the students and keep them local and we could continue to work with them," the professor said.

With TORC, that pipeline was born.

"Everybody that they're hiring could go out into industry and make more money and have a good career," Reinholtz said of TORC. "They're hiring people at probably below market rate because these people want to be part of a growing company."

Indeed, new employees Faruque, Bacha and Cheryl Bauman all said one major factor in their decision to join TORC was the opportunity to shape the company as it grows. And all three plan on staying with the firm well beyond the urban challenge's November race date.

"If we went to another company, we'd be starting at the bottom and have to learn about the company," said Bauman, who came to work for TORC a month after completing her master's at Tech. "With this company, we already kind of know what's involved with robotics and we've been working on it for the past couple years -- it's neat to be able to take what you're doing in school and immediately come out into the work world and do it."

Even if that means seeing a little less on their paycheck.

"We definitely didn't take this job for the money," Bacha said. "We're hoping, if we build the company, things will hopefully change. ... But if we were going after the money, we probably would have taken other jobs."