Autonomous Race Cars

Octothorp writes: "Though not as complicated as the underwater vehicles. There is an annual competition sponsored by National Semiconductors to build an autonomous race car. They move along pretty well too, at almost 9 ft/s. More technical information on how they are built is available on a Berkeley page, and there's a video of the winning run for 2002."

Comments

Re:Real-life application?

[cduffy]

I've got to disagree, at least on the expense and convenience points. If I have a day's worth of coding that can be done from my laptop, and want a ride between my (ex-)home in northern California and my employer's Sunnyvale headquarters, Amtrak seems just the thing. They don't send me through a bunch of security getting on the train, don't make me turn off my equipment at any time, and cost about 1/4 of what a plane ticket does ($70 vs $400) -- plus they connect directly to Caltrain, which takes me to within a few blocks of my final destination. Yes, they're slow -- but if my office happens to be wherever I am, that doesn't really matter so much.

I'd like cars that avoid sidewalls.

[theLOUDroom]

I just watched the video of the winning car and it's just not what I'd hoped for. All these cars are doing is following a line/wire.
I was just hoping that these cars were actually using sensors to keep track of the distance to the sidewalls of the track and the next turn.
It would be a good M. Eng. project for somebody to do this, using a half dozen laser distance sensors on the front, so that the car could go fast on straighaways, slow down for turns, and avoid sidewalls.
Does anyone know of a project like this?
With a good onboard computer, the car could build a model of the track as it went around, and calculate the optimal path & speeds to use on all subsequent laps. Using lasers or ultra sonic distance sensors would let the robot know when a turn was going to happen a lot sooner the the few inches of warning it gets in their setup. If you put an accelerometer in the car, you could even have it self-calibrate, discovering it's own acceleration curve, maximum lateral acceleration, and braking. It could then use those values to find the perfect path through the track on the second lap.

Disappointing

[the bluebrain]

I was expecting all sorts of bits coming together in this article, such as image/video processing, adding several images together, object recognition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as applied to video images (if it's blurred, you probably can't recognise what it is - but then, it's probably moving fast, so precise identicication takes a lower precedence than getting out of the way), attempts to put all gathered data into perspective, i.e., making a "map" of the outside world, and so on.

What do I get? Hey! I remember thses things from the eighties. You got a little bug with a couple of light sensors underneath, plus a red pen. You also got a thrashing when you covered the most available big flat white surface, which was the kitchen table, with roads (a.k.a. "scribbling").

OK, so they've gotten faster, but it looks like any car you upgrade with this tech will race down the centre marker of any highway you let it loose on ... which might actually be an improvement on some people's driving, come to think of it.