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Preparing for the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Challenge
Little Hamster writes "Post-gazette.com has an interesting article on the DARPA funded 200-mile autonomous vehicle race across the California-Nevada desert. They interviewed teams from two of the early favourites, Carnegie Mellon University and the California Institute of Technology. The teams talked about challenges on driving at high speed over a combination of roads, rough terrain and brush-covered desert, where the robot would need to consider how fast it can make a turn, the possibility of spinning tires and the potential to become airborne when hitting bumps."
just noticed this "new" story in the Older Articles section on the right: with 0 comments, and supposedly posted yesterday. "600 New Species of Fish Discovered (0)"
Just fly over the desert :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
To know your doing your part in developing the next generation of machines designed to kill people with even greater efficieny.
Hooah!
metamoderate(unfair);
where the robot would need to consider how fast it can make a turn, the possibility of spinning tires and the potential to become airborne when hitting bumps.
None of this superfluous stuff ever stopped me from driving. These autonomous robots are going to drive like... well robots. I think I'll envy driving behind old people once these suckers start hogging the passing lane.
. . . Lie first and then invade some unfortunate backwards nation to steal their resources.
Just mount a versalaser on it, remove the laser safety shroud, set it loose in Iraq and let it carve "WWJD" on all the terrorist's foreheads...
They'd kill each other after that...
Team manager William "Red" Whittaker, left, and technical manager Chris Urmson at the goddamn garage where the motherfucking Humvee, dubbed Sandstorm, is being fitted for the fucking race.
But with the goddamn start of a piece of shit $1 million, winner-take-all race across the goddamn California-Nevada desert less than 150 days away, these suddenly are questions that not only are being asked but answered.
The motherfucking Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which is sponsoring the piece of shit race, had set last Tuesday as the goddamn deadline for teams to submit technical papers regarding their vehicles. Eighty six teams -- some from universities and robotics firms, others simply composed of robot enthusiasts -- submitted papers.
Teams have to pass DARPA's technical muster before they can participate. Five teams already have been approved, making them early favorites; they include Carnegie Mellon University and the goddamn California Institute of Technology. The goddamn rest of the goddamn field won't be announced until Oct. 28, when DARPA completes its technical reviews.
The cocksucking roughly 200-mile race will begin outside of Barstow, Calif., on the motherfucking morning of March 13 and end no more than 10 hours later outside of Las Vegas.
No robot has ever traveled so far, so fast, without human intervention. Even if none of the cocksucking entrants can finish the goddamn first running of the cocksucking race, officials at DARPA, the motherfucking Pentagon's research and development arm, hope that the piece of shit effort will spark innovation in self-driving vehicles, a cocksucking technology that the cocksucking U.S. military wants to use someday on the motherfucking battlefield.
"We're doing something that a motherfucking lot of people feel can't be done," said Chris Urmson, a motherfucking graduate student at Carnegie Mellon and technical manager for its team, organized by famed roboticist William "Red" Whittaker and known as the piece of shit Red Team. Proving those doubters wrong, he contended, would provide a piece of shit major boost for mobile robot technology.
"Sometimes," he said, "people just need to see a piece of shit signpost and say, 'Hey, they can do it, why can't we do it?' "
That's why Urmson, 27, decided to delay completion of his doctoral degree so he could work on the fucking Red Team. And it's why about four dozen Carnegie Mellon students are pitching in, many of them gathering late each afternoon at an old garage known as the goddamn planetary robotics building and working until midnight, or 2 a.m., or until they just fall asleep.
The goddamn team is at the fucking halfway point in a motherfucking 300-day development schedule laid out by Whittaker last spring. The fucking first 100 days were spent planning and organizing, the goddamn second 100 days are occupied with assembling the fucking vehicle and developing its all-important software, and the goddamn last 100 days will be spent in the fucking field, testing and refining the piece of shit system.
"It is as much a piece of shit challenge to fund and maintain the goddamn team as it is to solve the motherfucking technical challenge," Whittaker said last week. Though happy that his team is seen as a motherfucking favorite in the motherfucking race, he's not so comfortable with some press accounts suggesting the piece of shit Carnegie Mellon effort is well-funded.
"I'm scratching it out on nerve," Whittaker insisted, noting the goddamn team has been heavily reliant on student labor and donations from corporate sponsors. "If [the team] is a fucking Goliath, it certainly has nothing to do with our bank account."
Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette
In the cocksucking foreground, Kevin Peterson and Prasanna Velagapud test their mockup steering program for Sandstorm.
Even so, he has recruited high-powered help, including off-road racing champion Rod Millen and Fox Chapel race team owner Chip Ganassi. Corporate sponsors include Intel, Caterpil
We're developing a robotic goat and incorporating a fleshlight in the design.
Bruderschaft - Forever
I don't believe in the existence of mercy's guiding hand...
Not with all that I have witnessed, I cannot understand.
Forever burdened with the knowledge that I could have been so much more
When the truth is hard to suffer, I knew all this before
There is no comfort in faith, the heavens still will fail.
A thousand towers rise before me and I cannot climb them all.
There is no kind of joy in this, there is no time that it can heal.
When emptiness enshadows bliss, there is nothing left to feel.
I have not abandoned hope, though I know there's nothing more.
Tired and alone, you forget what you hoped for.
I will walk this ground forever
and stand guard against your name.
I will give all I can offer.
I will shoulder all the blame.
I am sentry to you now,
all your hopes and all your dreams.
I will hold you to the light,
that's what forever means.
I was never what you wanted, I could never never please.
I swallowed all our sorrow in the midst of my disease.
All my fortunes, all my gains, all the battles I have won...
Now collapsing like the rain, I stand alone, your only son.
Take some solace in these words, take notice of this place.
Hollow whispers that they are, like the wind upon my face.
Sing softly in my ear and look at me with wonder.
I will try to ease your fear as the darkness pulls you under.
And if the source code that runs the thing ever goes public, then the vehicle gets remarkably easier to target, given another computer and a detailed topomap of the area.
So pretty soon we're going to be having 'suspected terrorists' turning to ash on the street? I'm sure the government's stance at first will be "well these evildoers seem to have spontaneously combusted or prematurely blown themselves up".
This is really cool.. technology like this could be used in consumer cars to reduce rollover/tire spin/etc. Maybe even 'smart' cars that drive themselves, leaving the human passengers free to sleep or get work done.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
On the other hand, they get to blow stuff up, use expensive computers, and build really cool networks....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is just really a secret program by the military to find ways to invade middle eastern countries with more efficiency!
Isn't anybody concerned about autonoumous vehicles running over spectators? "Hey, I thought it was a rock." I certainly wouldn't trust my life to a DARPA visual recognition system.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I remember seeing all kinds of stuff about this "up and coming" hovercraft technology. Then it just disappeared from the mainstream. Is there a reason this hasn't progressed further? Seems like a good solution for desert navigation.
That would be cool.
Get these robots to drive NASCAR to entertain the automatons known as fans.
You ever wonder if video game developers haven't already solved many of the AI issues in terms of driving?
The real problem would be getting the track information in real time and telling the AI what each object is.
Then again I am sure game developers get to cut a bunch of corners because the AI knows the track perfectly because it is a part of its system.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
About time that somebody did something about dangerous cellphone users. I would use one after the technology gets a good track record. I could work on a laptop and still get to work. Nice for all the drunks out there after work too. Stop by the bar and still get safely home.
Got hosting
The first posters here don't have a clue as to the effects and circumstances of this. The purpose is not Autonomous Kill Vehicles though it might occur. Cruise Missiles etc already do this as does the Predator to one degree or another. The purpose here is to reduce the overhead cost on the army dramatically in hauling supplies etc over long distances with or without roads. To do this you need vehicles than can bypass disabled vehicles and overcome obstacles. They need to be free of drivers who get tired and eat up supplies.
The real effect here will be civilian. The project which like it or not will happen regardless of DARPA someday soon, is going to very nearly completely alter how we live.
To illustrate: suppose you are old blind and unable to drive. (It happens to the best of us) Now you will be able to go where you want without somebody driving you. Suppose you want to go to work but don't want to own a car? Mass Transit? No! you just get on your cell phone and call for a car. It arrives shortly and takes you where you want to go and without a driver. Freight? No more Truck Drivers and the wreaks from them being too tired. No more Taxi Drivers. Close most of the Hospitals because wreaks are not filling them up. Kids will not need parents to drive them somewhere.
There is very nearly nothing more profound than this race! It will reorganize our world. The issue here is how will we adapt. This isn't an esoteric question. We had better face it now.
For the Luddites amung us, give it up. Stopping DARPA will only give the technological edge to China. They will do the work. This is a very high amplification Technology. It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
You can just see it now can't you. The losers are going to be saying "Well we programmed the robots with female personality. Its not our fault that in 200 miles of flat desert it crashed into the only gate post on the entire course"
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Fuck DARPA, and FUCK YOU.
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DARPA typically only funds projects or research that may be useful commercially as well as militarily.
Yesterday's decentralized military communications system is today's internet. Today's robot-driven combat vehicle is tomorrow's smart car.
That's why DARPA projects are public -- we get to use the technology too. Or perhaps you'd rather we just threw the money into some secret black box projects, never to see the light of day?
How are cars that drive themselves "out there?" A bus doesn't drive itself, and trains are mostly automatic because they drive on a fixed track, with speeds in a lookup table for segments of the route. That method may be scalable to speed limits on roads, but does not help with collision detection, routing, re-routing (in case of accidents or construction), red-lights/stop signs, etc. We've still got a ways to go before Johhny Cab drive us around.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
I mean, it'd only be really cool if they programmed the driving after KITT or the General Lee:
-and the potential to become airborne when hitting bumps.
Robot driver - "Hot damn, bet I could get some serious height jumping off those rocks over there! Balls to the wall, baby!"
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
Considering we've already set the precedent for using unmanned flying vehicles to execute suspected terrorists (including a US citizen) from the sky.
Any watershed advancement like this produces (1) Advantages, (2) Disadvantages and (3) Chaos. Generally, that means (in order) (1) Profits and efficiency if you are on the receiving end of the technology advancements, (2) Unemployment, obsolescence or business/financial ruin if you are on the wrong end of the technology advancement and (3) some degree of Wild-West while laws, regulations and cultural adaptation has not caught up to the new status-quoe.
It Amplifies People a LOT. The issue as always will be the morals of those being Amplified, and will we allow this to cause others to be lost in the "noise."
An interesting observation. I assume that you mean fewer people focusing fewer resources into transportation and therefore able to focus on other things (thereby making other human endeavors more efficient with the same number of people). I agree.
However, this would be a very gradual process (going to autonomous transportation tech). We will probably see it first in commercial vehicles as some sort of driver assist (think cruise-control that can change lanes and slow-down or speed-up based on traffic).
After many years or decades, perhaps, we will see full-scale auto-pilot in vehicles. No doubt, this would have to be accompanied by massive alarms when the unexpected happens, forcing the required human occupant (or remote emergency operators) to take control. I imagine the backlash when accidents occur and deaths insue...
About the same time that we are probably struggling with the idea of machine rights (maybe 50 years from now), it may be that more machine-operated vehicles are in use than human-operated. Because this will no doubt be a slow process of adoption, perhaps we won't really notice the changes that it is making to our societies or economics...
This is certainly an interesting topic.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Let's see them drive that beast through Bruce County Ontario blizzard...
The real entertainment is once these vehicles are crusing at notable speeds with cargo on board, force the creators of the vehicles to ride in their newly created automated machine of death...er, car.
on the edge of the desert. When the drugs began to take effect...
Can you imagine taking one of these rigs to Vegas, hopped up on two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls....
That would be AWESOME.
J
Welcome to Johnnycab.
Please stwate your destination.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Sure, robot cars sound cool, like KITT, and even KARR was cool in his own way. But technology like this could elimate all those taxi driver jobs. Yeah, and you know what that means. All those guys will start taking over our programming jobs here too.
Sounds cool, but it's not a real robot car until they give it Turbo Boost.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
After reading the rules I occurs to me that a motorcycle could finish this the fastest. It would only need a simple mechanical way to upright itself.
(I thought of it first. cburkey@einnovation.com
I just returned from doing some acoustic testing at Georgia Tech and guess what was sitting 10 feet away from me and i got to inspect. A Humvee about to be raced that is Autonomous. They wouldnt say what it was for but I just got home after 7 hours of driving and saw this...Well ill be dipped, thats what the Humvee was for...cool...and GO Yellow Jackets!!!
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
I run one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding, equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines. All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
Post questions and I'll answer them here.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
I'm not sure who did the estimation, but they're an order of magnitude high. To date we've spent somewhere around $350K, mostly to pay for student labor over the Summer.
But they have all those free grad students...
Johnny-Cab: Hello, I'm Johnny-Cab! Where can I take you tonight?
Quaid: Drive, drive!
Johnny-Cab: Could you please repeat the destination?
Quaid: Anywhere, just go, go!
Johnny-Cab: Please state a street and number.
Quaid: Shit! Shit!
Johnny-Cab: I'm not familiar with that address! Could you please repe--
[Quaid rips the damn thing out and drives it himself.]
Well, it will always be "easy" for a computer to figure out the 'optimal' path through terrain. (of course, by "easy" I mean "NP-hard", but a computer could figure out the best easily-findable paths that another computer would probably use)
This gets into game theory, i.e. choosing certain sub-optimal paths in order to reduce 'predictability'.
If you're using simulated annealing or genetic algorithms to find a path, then you will probably be pretty unpredictable already, wether or not someone else has the source code.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There's no human in the car to keep safe. All they need to is provide an 'unflipping' mechanism, or put wheels on the roof.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Just a thing or two to point out...
Don't take this the wrong way, this is the real world, (well, millitary at least), and everyone doesn't get a fair chance. Those who can get more money have a better shot at winning, so yes, it is unfair. Deal with it. DARPA doesn't care about conducting a fair contest, they just want the best possible technology out of it.
Secondly, although Caltech probably has spent more than $400k all told, i doubt its anywhere near $5 mil.
Also, when did a 1986 model hmmwv count as brand new?
I wish you luck with the challenge, its always amazing what can be done on a shoestring budget by motivated people.
I don't know about auto-pilots but I have driven real SUVs (Land-rover) seriously off road. For a human being it isn't exactly easy and when there is no track at all to follow, 20MPH can be difficult to maintain. As a human, even with the ground clearance of a real SUV, you are very aware of the danger of catching your oil-sump on a rock (I dinged it multiple times, but was slow enough not to crack it).
I wish you good luck though and please come back here and tell us about it!!!!
See my journal, I write things there
Imagine what the DOD will do with this little robot. You guys are like Einstein and his Atomic Bomb . ;-)
Let someone else do the killing, we'll just build the bot so innocently
"But bombs were not what Einstein had in mind when he published this equation.
Indeed, he considered himself to be a pacifist. In 1929, he publicly declared that
if a war broke out he would "unconditionally refuse to do war service, direct or
indirect... regardless of how the cause of the war should be judged."
(Ronald Clark, "Einstein: The Life and Times", pg. 428).
His position would change in 1933, as the result of Adolf Hitler's ascent to power in Germany. While still promoting peace, Einstein no longer fit his previous self-description of being an "absolute pacifist". "
Personally I doubt anyone will win any time soon, the course is intentionally difficult.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
nevermind
Going 30MPH, rather than 15MPH, over 20 miles of tough terrain, gains 60 minutes. (90 minutes vs 30 minutes).
That's why rough-terrain performance is more important than flatland performance.
The Polaris Ranger has a thick ABS plastic skid plate over the whole bottom of the vehicle.
But this isn't about the vehicle. It's a software and sensor problem. What's really needed to do this well is better laser rangefinders. They're coming.
John Nagle
Team Overbot
This is why I can just wish you luck on this. Its bad enough trying to steer a vehicle offroad as a human let alone a machine.
See my journal, I write things there
I bring this up not to discredit the idea that driverless cars will likely someday be a (very useful) reality. I am sure that enormous progress is being made in this kind of endeavor. I simply wish to point out that even after this race, there will still be a long way to go before Hal drives Ms Daisy out for groceries.
As an aside, I am very curious as to the percentage of the participating vehicles that will succeed in crossing the finish line at all...
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
My first thoughts at seeing this topic were of the Killer Cars from the Monty Python skit.