Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

DARPA Grand Challenge Teams Submit Videos to DARPA

Posted by timothy on from the film-at-11-in-some-timezone dept.

doughnuthole writes "The deadline for DARPA Grand Challenge teams to submit their videos to DARPA just passed and some have posted them online. Some of the teams with these videos posted are Team Caltech, Axion Racing, Virginia Tech (on the Media page), Insight Racing, and UMass Dartmouth. The Grand Challenge is a 175 mile race run by fully autonomous vehicles. Since no teams completed the 2004 race, DARPA decided to run it again, this time for $2 million."

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Lets hope the *software* is better! by nxmehta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of my buddies is on one of these teams (which will remain nameless). According to him, one of the major problems last year was the enormous amount of time spent on sensor and hardware development vs. the incredibly small amount of time spent on software development and testing. When you have an autonomous vehicle with great realtime terrain mapping capabilities, but with no collision detection code (!), you get a hunk of metal with great vision that likes to run into the same bush over and over again. Other teams did have collision detection in, which would back the vehicle up when a potential collision was detected. However, the vehicle would pick up too many potential collisions (lots of bushes and rocks in the desert) and continously back up! Just goes to show you that developing the algorithms for these things is pretty important. Let's hope they get it right this year... although the chances are pretty slim.

    1. Re:Lets hope the *software* is better! by jtogel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm not sure software is neccesarily so important when compared to the hardware of these vehicles. I'm currently TA'ing a course in bio-inspired robotics, where students have to build robots to solve a variety of tasks. It turns out most tasks are solvable with the same few lines of code, conceptually similar to the wiring of the first few Braitenberg vehicles, only the robots are slighlty modified and sensors repositioned.

      Hardware, especially sensors and their positioning, matter far more than people think.

  2. Team Aggie Spirit Video by atrus · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As part of Team Aggie Spirit, I'd figure I should share our video:

    http://www.stackworks.net/TASVCD.mpg

    It takes an amazing amount of work to get to even this stage, but we're making very fast progress.

    We're a new, entirely student run team with a very limited budget, and always looking for sponsors. If you know anyone who can provide money, equipment, supplies or other assitance, let us know!