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

Doubtful

[7Ghent]

Well, considering that the best performer for this year didn't even make 15 miles, I'm hopeful that someone will actually complete the course, but not in under 10 hours.

Re:Doubtful

[ciroknight]

I don't doubt it for a minute. Being a Florida Tech freshman in the fall, I want to try to get involved with this project. I've worked on stereo optics systems before using two webcams and I can tell you that this kind of system holds great promise at winning the race. In combination with great laser range-finding and possibly optical range finding (something like us humans do), even acustical systems, a machine has just as good of a chance to pilot a car as it can an aircraft or anything else.

Another thing: use the 2d images to build a 3d map on the fly, approximenting object sizes by finding the edges of the object in the pictures, and you should be able to navigate around and over them quite easily. The car also plays a key roll; it needs to be adapted into a dune buggy of sorts; huge soft tires and great suspension.
Scary that we're working on this for the government though..

Re:Doubtful

[rmohr02]

Ohio State had a team that entered this year, and they worked on their entry right next to the workspace of a project team I'm a part of. I heard, albeit secondhand, why most entries didn't work, and the only real reason is that the teams were unfamiliar with the course (e.g., Columbus doesn't exactly have a large desert to test the entry in).

A couple nights before the competition was to take place, it rained on the "course", as it is. Thus, there were many relatively large bushes in the desert when the competition started. This was not something most teams had planned for--however, they did plan for large rocks. Thus, a 9' tall truck would drive up to a (now relatively small) bush, detect it, determine it was a rock, and then try to plot a course around it rather than simply driving through it, which would have worked fine. With the number of bushes that had sprouted up, it was only a matter of time before a truck's computer got swamped trying to avoid all of the "rocks".

I look forward to hearing about next year's competition, for which I'm sure teams will think to find a way of differentiating a bush and a rock.

Re:Doubtful

[ciroknight]

Trust me, I understand that too, but that's when you have to get into surface approximentations and such. If a surface looks scattered like a clump of grass, then it's booleaned from a screen of black. The resultant image should be easy enough to pattern match to images of trees, rocks, brush, or anything else in a library. Dunno how well this would work in real-life, but this is what I did with my little toy model and it worked well.

Another way might be to test the density of the object, or to use color like we humans do.. If somethings green or yellow and sparce, it's more likely tumbleweed or a bush, otherwise it's a rock.

Lastly, at certain speeds, objects of certain sizes should be tossed out. If it's the size of a small mellon *smaller than a water mellon lets say*, then just throw the object out. It's not going to effect the car going at a speed of 35-65 MPH if the car's built right.

Just a few ideas. If I do get the chance to be in the project like I'm hoping, I'll get to test a few of them. Otherwise it's probably just idle chatter. Either way, it's something to think about.

Re:Doubtful

[ciroknight]

I usually keep it as a policy not to respond to AC's; they don't have the balls to say it to my face, then it means nothing. But this time, I'm going to reply anyways.

Yes, there are cases where there will be no edges to find, but in those cases, it's usually okay to just keep trucking a-long. It's not just one technology that will win this race, it's the combination of all of them working together to solve a common problem.

As for speed, increasing the shutter rate of the camera, using multiple cameras, and faster computers deal with speed processing. The idea is to slowly ramp up speeds as it's safe, and the instant there's something in the way, begin to slow down and steer, noting the deviance against the path, and undoing it as soon as is convienient.

To end all, yes, the real world is different than the theoretical and the experimental world, but both worlds are based on the real world, and the rules are the same. Approximenting is what we usually do in the real world to make up for the inadaquacies of it. Since the world isn't perfect, neither can our machines be.

Short answer...

[sinner0423]

No. Last time a good 30%, I believe, didn't even make it out the gate. I seriously doubt any of them will "win". Well, I'm sure they're all winners, like in the special olympics, but i don't think they will FINISH the course.

rallying

[SuperBanana]

Lesson learned: "Get new sensors that can distinguish between bush and rock." This all sounds pretty pathetic, but having just completed a master-level course in artificial intelligence, I suddenly understand just how difficult some of these issues are to solve.

Watch a rally. Rally drivers have codrivers w/notes, and prior knowledge of the course...but I believe with Baja it's mostly seat of the pants; Paris-Dakar has got to be since it's so damn long, but I could be mistaken. They average well over 60mph on a course that's got to be much worse than anything DARPA came up with. Of course, they have astronomical component failure and driver error rates (as well as the occasional wildlife incident- one rally team hit a cow at well over 60mph, it was NOT pretty- I think they also got arrested, because it was a serious crime in the host country, akin to murder, to kill a cow), and at 60mph, rocks look like bushes and bushes like rocks, until it's way too late to do anything about it. Rally teams just bolt up more plating on the important stuff, and hope for the best.

What went wrong: "On-off switch located on side of vehicle. Bumped into a wall on way out of start area. Turned self off." Lesson learned: "Put the on-off switch somewhere else."

While not defending them, it was probably an emergency disconnect switch, which you do want to be highly accessible for those times when, say, it starts driving away (or towards something) and shouldn't have. Yes, DARPA required radio safety switches, but do you really want to trust your life to just a radio disconnect?

Honestly, some teams were just stupid in their use of money and priorities- I got a huge kick out the team that had a giant plasma display TV in the passenger side of the cabin. What the -fuck- was that for, watching the Superbowl while the car drives you to the next checkpoint?

Re:Against the rules

[Maserati]

If you're going to go tethered, then why not just go inflatable for the remote unit ? Other than snagging cable you won't have too many problems from having a balloon floating over your robot. It just needs to be bouyant enough to lift a small camera. I'd suggest using compress-air cartridges to inflate the balloon, you probably don't want to hassle with any sort of compressor.

prediction: the winning entry will be D6 based

[bandy]

I predict that this will finally be won by a Cat D6 (bulldozer) based vehicle. Drive through small things. Don't get caught up in barb-wire fences. A little GPS and some vision thing for detecting deep holes and you're there.

I don't think that a balloon will work here

[dexterpexter]

A balloon is a fine idea for slow-moving robots.

However, towing a balloon behind a robot that travels at an average 30 mph would present a problem.

For a demonstration:
Fill a balloon with helium and then try to run with it. Instead of staying afloat, it will sink.

Then there is another problem. Compressed air cartridges would only dispense AIR into the balloon.

You cannot simply fill a balloon with air and have it float. You would need something like helium.

But then, you still run into the issue of trying to manage a balloon at high speeds.
It would work if your strategy was to stop and then release the balloon, then retract it before resuming. Problem with this is that a balloon would be more subject to the wind (deserts are notorious for horrible winds), accidental tears in the bushes, and a lack of stability (what is to stop it from being blown to turn around in the opposite direction?)
A helicopter would offer steering power, and some thrust to counter what the wind is sending at you.

Overall, I think a small helicopter (or propelled aerial vehicle of some sort) would offer more stability.

Re:couple of thoughts...

[Lije Baley]

Well, in response to your first concern, while it is certainly a shame that international teams can't contribute to solving this problem from their unique perspectives, it's probably not in the U.S.' security interest to encourage such projects abroad. Today's good friend can always become tomorrow's bitter enemy - this is not paranoia, it's history. If nothing else, it's simply good (internal) politics to try to keep the potential economic and scientific benefits within the U.S. For the record, I truly believe in diversity. Not just because it's fair or in vogue, but because I believe the best ideas come from the broadest set of perspectives. I think this has been key to the U.S.' technological success in the past, feeding off our "melting pot". It seems that the E.U. can rival this, and to compete with Asia, serious EU-US cooperation may be required to maintain any semblance of our present standards of living. Sorry, I digress...

As for your second concern(s), the basic argument for defense applies to the "help the military" question. As long as humans are human, there will be those who seek to take advantage of others, consciously or not, and we as individuals or groups can ignore that only at our own peril. History almost certainly reveals only a tiny fraction of those people(s) who were overrun and exterminated or assimilated by those who were aggressive and capable. Some in that 95% mentioned above may go on to use their good ideas to develop something which could threaten the U.S. and others, as a U.S. citizen I would expect us to research and develop any potentially unique military capability, so that we could at least understand and counter it.

Your fear of the Terminator/Matrix scenario is, IMHO, really premature at this point. Even if they succeed in the DARPA challenge, it will be a long time until we have roving, fully-autonomous-fire vehicles that have the capability to operate and maintain themselves, let alone their supporting infrastructure. The military has enough problems with friendly-fire as it is, some already due to poor machine decisions. I don't think they are so hot on turning ANYTHING (man or machine) loose with a weapon. I would guess the military's real direction with this stuff is to use autonomous machines to reduce communication link requirements and tedium for remote operation by humans - i.e. one man could be controlling vehicle A, targeting and firing weapons, while also being responsible for vehicles B and C, autonomously enroute to different recon sites, and vehicle C is currently out of contact due to terrain, weather, enemy jamming, equipment failure, etc, but returning or maneuvering to get back in touch.