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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."
I recall an experiment done in California a few months back whereby cars automatically drive themselves on a stretch of a highway equipped with magnetic strips down the centre of the lane.
Since public transport seems to be out of the question for medium-distance transportation in the States (witness Amtrak's plight - and CoachUSA's financial gymnastics of late) automated private transport might fill the gap - provided price can be brought down.
It is really interesting to see what comes out of this. Certainly more applicable in the near future than football-playing robots - or this terrible series in the UK with robots battling each other, armed with saws, hammers and whatnot contraptions..
Curious,
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
The key to this particular competition seems to be the size and weight limits on the cars. This is a contest for little RC-style cars. The technology exists to go much faster, but not in this form factor.
It's my opinion that autopilot for your car is an inevitable development. It will become the only way to keep highways scaling. Adding more lanes to add capacity works to a point, but doesn't work forever. I don't think it's feasable to expect a human to navigate a twenty or thirty lane highway. And the density of traffic which an existing highway can carry is limited by the poor driving ability of humans.
I think eventually high-capacity highways will require the use of an autopilot. Doing so would allow the cars to be run with inter-car gaps which would be suicidal with a human behind the wheel. Most stop-n-go situations are due to bad planning on the part of drivers. They speed up too much when traffic clears ahead, zoom up on the cars in front, and then have to slow down to avoid an accident. This type of driving creates waves of congestion which travel backwards down the highway, and is due entirely to poor coordination among drivers. But there is no reason that under computer control rush hour can't cruise along at 60 miles an hour with a car length or less between cars. I bet you could easily triple the maximum capacity of a highway, not to mention getting everybody to their destination faster and with better fuel economy to boot. The R&D will be expensive, but like any electrics the hardware will be practically free once developed. Compared to the cost of expanding existing freeway's, it will make sense finacially too. I figure it's maybe 10 years out.
American's are not likely to give up their cars for any sort of public transportation, no matter how impractical cars become with rising fuel costs, increasing travel times due to congestion, increasing insurance rates, etc. Most Americans have convinced themselves that they enjoy sitting in stop and go traffic, as long as it's in a car and not a bus. But if we could figure out a way to let them keep their cars, reduce pollution, reduce accidents, let them safely talk on their cell phones, and not have to build mile-wide highways I suspect a lot of us might go for it.
I also participated in the NATCAR competition, and as Octothorp said, part of the experience was the learning, of learning how to do speed control, power circuitry, etc.
All the Berkeley cars used a microcontroller for timing (Infineon chips, not National Semi), and many of our teams' sensors were simple RLC circuits, not National Semi. Sure we used National Semi for sensor amps and parts of the power circuitry, but even then many of their chips were eschewed in favor of better chips. In my team's case (and for many other teams) we used Linear Technologies and Maxim parts because we found the NatSemi chips insufficient. If NatSemi was trying to push their parts, they didn't succeed too well.
My team attempted a learning algorithm, but given the time frames (15 weeks from chassis to competition, 5 minutes total on competition track with messups included) and various last minute disasters, we couldn't perfect it in time for the competition. I know of at least 2 other teams who also tried to memorize to increase time. Also in the case of teams from other schools, they built completely analog cars (PID controllers in hardware *shudder*), with obviously no memorization possible. Even without memorization, it's more than just dumb line following. You can try to tweak the line following to shave off 10ths of a second here and there, but you still have the challenge to remain stable when the track suddenly changes course. Also, sorting out confusing magnetic fields at track crossings is a challenge all its own.
6MPH, at 1/10 scale, is the equivalent of 60MPH. Try getting a full sized car to follow tracks at that speed on its own, without overshooting more than 15 feet away from the track even on sharp turns. It truely is a challenge.
CogniToy has a game that simulates the programming of these robots. They have a small web based demo Here If you go to their main page you can get more details on the full game