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Still More on the DARPA Grand Challenge
The SF Chronicle has an in-depth story on the DARPA Grand Challenge, with emphasis on the several teams from the San Francisco area. The three teams covered are using a pickup truck, a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, and a self-balancing motorcycle...
Err - offtopic?! (It's meant to be funny)
(Hmm, "userless modding" maybe?)
Ahh well. As for the driverless car/truck/bike - this sounds quite cool, what makes this harder than pilotless planes? (We already have those, the drone things... I am missing something?)
I wonder how much do NASA and DARPA collaborate. Much of the technology used to create the mars rovers seems like they would be useful for this challenge.
From the article: "The biggest hurdle has been making vehicles see obstacles and react to them"
The mars rovers use a pair of cameras to build a 3d model when it decides its path. Put this system into a 4x4, give it a small cluster for computation, and it should work well enough to make it across the desert, I would think.
John Negle aka Animats is the Slashdot's most prolific poster.
I still can't believe my "joke" got a modded as "offtopic".
Anyway, is navigating a desert so hard? You can use GPS to plot position, and if you're on the ground you can't hit it! There aren't any significant drops that can't be detected by satalite are there? (I know the dunes move, but a significantly large rover isn't going to have a problem there is it?)
Sure you the device was to be deployed in a non-desert setting things would be harder.
do they have a plan in case these driver-less vehicles are roaming outside the designated path and start running people over?
I just read an article in Scientific American about this. I'm not into robotics myself, but I'm curious: how much of the difficulty is due to the time it takes to process the input data (from cameras, lasers, etc.)? how much is from the necessary ruggedness of the components? how much difficulty comes from lack of funding for and access to top-of-the-line components? I'm also curious to see what DARPA plans to do with the winning vehicle, if there is a winner. Will they pay for, and then take, any vehicle that is innovative (for example, the motorcycle that can stand on its own)?. Kudos to DARPA for their clever method of conducting research--instead of tying funds up in someone's brainchild, they are allowing a lot of different ideas to proliferate.
War does not determine who is right, war determines who is left.
The difficulty with autonomous land vehicles is using sensor data to figure out what the environment is like, and using that information to plan what to do next. Both are AI problems, not hardware problems (though, certainly, clever sensor hardware and lots of computer power helps).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Automobiles should be restricted to 4 mph, and preceded by a man carrying a red flag (an presumably singing the Internationale for good measure).
Machines such as the Spinning Jenny will destroy our way of life.
I salute you, Ned Ludd, for your foresight and insight into the human condition.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Something I wondered about the scenario of the car taking off in the suburban street.
How does i know which side of the road to drive on?
How do you tell it that half of it's obstacle-free passage is actually not allowed to be driven on because that's for traffic going in the other direction ?
Technological advances in US's Weapons of Mass Destruction has so far not decreased the casualty rate, but increased it.
Look at the statistics from Iraq. They basically had no army worth fighting. They were crippled by 10 years of UN sactions. They were a few small steps away from being armed with rocks and sling-shots.
The US army was far superior technologically. But 10,000 civilians died, and millions more are going to die because of Depleted Uranium poisoning.
Pumping yet more money into the US military will certainly not save any lives.
only recently have we been getting studies 'proving' the toxicity of agent orange. The traditional defense that our government had used to protect itself from lawsuits from the innocent civilians in South Vietnam and vets: "What poison?". So the government has blocked/failed to fund research for many years. People are rightly terrified of us military applications of technology because the us military A) frequently fights the weak as opposed to the evil for political or economic gain (thereby supporting the military industrial-complex) B) has a history of human rights crimes and supporting human rights abusers. And technology makes this more easy and harder to defend against. It's not propoganda...read the bland-old-bbc...as a less personal start for most US citizens, u might want to read the timeline about Israel and the Palestinians. What you read in the news gives a very biased pro-Israel perspective imho. Not surprising since we invest heavily in the Israeli military.
All your preview button are belong to Hello Kitty.
I was the lead engineer of the Grand Challenge team 'R Junk Works'. Our paper was submitted and approved by DARPA for the Grand Challenge. They then put us in the 'Partially Acceptable' category just after approval. This was no big deal for us as we already had our prototype vehicle built and were testing it in October of 2003 before we submitted our Technical Paper. Their 'Site Visit' seemed like just another hoop to jump through before being in the race. There are only three people on our team, and we all have worked in one form or another for the 'Lockheed Martin Skunk Works', so our little group we called the spin offs - or the 'R Junk Works'. We are also located in Palmdale California. In retrospect, perhaps it was our team name that gave DARPA hesitation. Heaven forbid that only three guys in a garage in Palmdale with a name like ours win their Grand Challenge! Anyway, the four DARPA site visitors/inspectors arrived at my garage on the 5th of December to inspect our progress. They road around in our test vehicle that had: Integrated DGPS, LN200INU and V4L2 Vision systems running under LINUX Fedora Core 1.0 all installed and functional in my personal 1998 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. They let it slip that this was a 'first for them' to be riding around in one of the contestants vehicles. They road around in the drivers seat around the desert next to my house here in Palmdale along a pre programmed course that took them down dirt desert roads and washes here in the Mojave Desert - only a few mile away from where they are going to have the actual race. Members of this inspection team jump in front of our vehicle as it was traversing the pre programmed course and watched how it avoided them by driving around them and continuing down the course. They watched with amazement as our vehicle raced along in excess of 35 mph across the rutty Mojave Desert roads. Almost everything worked perfectly for the demo except our main vision system camera had been damaged the day before and we were using our backup camera that was having intermittent problems, but did not take away from the totality of the demo. It was probably one of the best demos I have ever given in my entire professional life. If I could summarize their attitude of the demonstration, it would be that they were amazed, enthused and excited over our participation in the Grand Challenge. They also let it somewhat slip that we were the farthest along team that they had seen as yet! I tend to think that the inspection team was 'On our side' as possible contestants. After the demo, we assumed that it was inevitable that we would be selected for one of the remaining six contestant slots left. This was far from the case. They called us on December 17th (my birthday) and told us that we were not selected to participate. One of the inspection team members said: 'After a much heated discussion amongst the DARPA Program Director and our inspection team, I have been told to tell you that you were not selected to participate in the Grand Challenge.' The transparent reason they gave us was that our team did not, as yet, have an actual 'race vehicle'. A very trivial problem for us when it comes right down to it. This was by their very own undoing, as once our vehicle sponsors got wind that we were not in the 'Totally Acceptable' list; they backed out and were waiting for our team to be on that list before donating our actual race vehicle. We even supplied statements of sponsorship from that sponsor = they obviously did not read them = OR = perhaps there was another incentive. After talking to a guy called 'Dan' who is the editor of a national magazine and good friend of mine, he also went to the 'Kick Off' for the Grand Challenge that DARPA had in LA last year. He was able to 'Liquor Up' one of the DARPA legal reps, and SHE intimated that the reason they were holding the Grand Challenge was to put the fear of god into their current contractor and show that they could go else ware for technical projects. She also said that it had already achieved this goal and that even if the
Work and Fun Graduation
This page looks particularly interesting:
I really hope this challenge will be televised in some way. Network, cable, streamed over the net, anything.
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