Will There Be A Winning Autonomous Robot in 2005?

An anonymous reader submits "This summer is heating up the DARPA Grand Challenge as multiple top notch schools begin to announce their entry into the competition. The newest organization to announce its entry was the Florida Institute of Technology. Their project is known as Oasis - Autonomous Racing, and they have a team of over 45 students, professors, and advisors that are currently hard at work designing their vehicle and raising funds to pay for it. The DARPA Grand Challenge is a race between vehicles that should be designed to travel up to 300 miles in less than 10 hours through the desert or other harsh medium without any human interaction. The 2005 competition has a $2 million grand prize as authorized by congress. With all of the new entrants does anyone think that the competition will be won the second time around?"

Comments

It might happen...

[sgtsanity]

BTW, for all those interested, Wired ran a list of what went wrong for each team. It reads very comically, but a lot of these things are very "DUH!" after you've gone through the first time. I forsee a lot better results, as teams will have that much more practice. Hopefully some will come up with some more general solutions, rather than brute-force processing the terrain around the known area of the route.

Re:It might happen...

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the teams managed to do much brute-force terrain processing, because in general, their sensors didn't work.

The one that got the farthest just ran off of pre-computed GPS waypoints, and as the GPS accumulated drift error, it started driving to one side of the road, then in the ditch, then off road, until it hit something and stopped.

Most of them will never work

[Animats]

With the possible exception of CMU, nobody had a system that could avoid a ditch or a pothole. Stereo vision won't do a good enough job on dirt for long range ditch/pothole detection. All the laser rangefinders except CMU's were fixed line scanners, so they couldn't possibly profile the ground ahead reliably from a bouncing vehicle.

CMU's approach is a big hammer. They took a stock line-scanning laser rangefinder and put it in a huge 3-axis gimbal, which they then actively stabilize. That should be able to profile terrain, but it's a huge mechanical kludge. If you miss a spot because you hit a bump, you have a hole in your data. At that point you can either slow down and rescan, or plow ahead blindly. They may eventually complete the course with that rig, but no way is it a commercially viable technology.

The next generation of sensor technology may be ready in time. There are at least three groups with usable sensors in the prototype stage. We're talking to two of them. But that's all I'm going to say for now.

John Nagle / Team Overbot.

(We're recruiting. See our jobs page. No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize, we cover all expenses. Silicon Valley only. We have our own shop in an industrial park in Redwood City. If you're local, come over and see the thing.)

There is a rule against damaging the terrain

[dexterpexter]

The only problem I could see with this is that driving through things was not seen as an acceptable solution by DARPA. It stipulated that the terrain and obstacles must be left unharmed. I think there are reasonable allowances made, such as running through "weeds" and leaving faint tire tracks.

Sending a bulldozer through something, however, would likely cause harm.

The motive behind this, if I get to guess, is that they are looking for a more covert vehicle. Something that has torn through the terrain and left chaos in its wake is more likely to be tracked/disabled than something that can quickly and nimbly navigate across the terrain.

I think that your idea is a fine idea, though. If they are looking at application for war situations and covert navigation is not an issue, I think that you are onto something.

When I first heard about the competition, that was my first reaction, too. Why not just create a tank and plow through the terrain along the most direct route? A review of the rules showed that they had already taken into consideration this solution and created a rule against it. I can see their reasoning, though.

Re:I think they will

[jbrocklin]

Actually, I've read most of the technical papers that the teams were required to submit, and many of them did use a "track and assign danger levels" as a way of finding a best path (most used this as a way of keeping the vehicle inside the boundaries of the course - assign the off-course sections with infinite danger and the vehicle will never go there).

Overall, the majority of the problems that people were with unplanned problems, such as going up a hill and not switching down gears, stopping to check terrain, and then not being able to start back up again. Or getting a wheel stuck in a small ditch and not being able to get out (no friends to jump out of the car and push ya know).

I think that someone will win next year - or at least make it far enough that the logic part of the system will be proven effective. Sure there will be some little things that will hit just about every team, but I hope someone does a good enough job preparing that it will take a lot of little things to bring them down.