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Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge
doughnuthole writes "The official posting has been made of the 15 teams that qualified for the Grand Challenge, seven of which completed the entire QID course. The top three teams, and thus those who get to start first, were the Red Team, SciAutonics II, and Team Caltech. The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, with teams leaving every 5 minutes. A live webcast will be available at grandchallenge.org." Reader uss_valiant writes "Tomshardware runs an article about DARPA's Grand Challenge. It features new pictures, the DARPA video of the qualification and covers some technical challenges such as the obstacle detection."
For all those of us who don't have access to the DARPA channel, we can stream the telecast live from here.
These are the same people who appeared in this slashdot story and seems to be different from the "live webcast" mentioned in the story which only appears to have a tracking feature.
If a team leaves every 5 minutes, (and assuming the first few hundred yards is relatively easy going - you find that on most courses of any nature), then we are going to have an awful lot of bunching at the first point the vehicles start dropping below 25mph. Interestingly, the rules state that the team in front (i.e. being passed) has right of way, unless E-stopped.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
The prior event was the QID it was designed to determine the saftey of the vehicles only. they didn't change the rules mid-event (as the earilier post would have you believe). But a prior to the start of the QID.
A lot of folks are spending tons of time and energy attacking a hard problem. If DARPA thinks they deserve to watch their car leave the "official" start line, it's DARPA's decision to make. It's DARPA's event, they can run it however they want to, if they wanted to tape rubber ducks on the hoods prior to departure, they could ask eveyone to do so.
When I was a Freshman at CMU, I worked on a research programming project translating a bunch of the Navigation code for this self-driving HMMWV ("Hum vee"). It was originally written in C, and we converted it to Ada... though I bet it's been reverted back to a more versatile language.
It used multiple cameras mounted at different heights to build a 3D view of it's surroundings, and could judge all kinds of obstacles... though at the time (7 years ago) had a lot of trouble with streams and shadows. I was amazed that it could recognize stoplights correctly, and even signaled when it was changing lanes on a street.
Either way, it was a great project for a young would-be programmer to work on, very amazing stuff, and lots of cool toys to see in the Robotics Institute there.
-Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned for
DARPA has announced that in light of the difficulties encountered this year, next's year event will be reworked as the "reasonably-ordinary-challenge' and consist of an autonomous vehicle locating the nearest McDonalds, ordering burgers and fries, and returning before they get cold.