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DARPA Grand Challenge Teams Submit Videos to DARPA
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."
Let's hope the extra money makes the difference this year.
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but where I live it seems most of the cars on the road are self driven. The person behind the wheel is usually taking care of more pressing things like chatting on the phone, eating, putting on makeup, etc.
The problem is figuring out when it needs to leave cruise control and slow down, speed up, avoid collisions, turn, etc. You know, the 99% of the time when you aren't on a straight, flat, open road with no traffic.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
This thing is the SportsMobile from Team Caltech: just imagine the advances in science if Snoop Dogg had entered the DARPA Grand Challenge! Pimpin' hard but somebody's gotta do it I guess...
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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!
Interesting that the DARPA Challenge rule precludes hovercrafts from competing as they do not primarily use traction with the ground for propulsion.
I hope a team enters with a very large metal hollow sphere with gear teethmarks lining the inside and the machinery be a shaft, gyroscope and gears on both ends of unequal weight. The rest of the contents can be fuel/energy cells to power the rotating motion of the machinery inside -- it essentially just has to "throw" itself in a direction and keep rolling and steering. Travelling 175 miles ought to be possible as long as the terrain isn't ridiculous.
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A load of drone cars should be driven behind these competitors with models of druglords with machine guns, outlaws, corrupt police officers, and people to whom the teams own money.
That way, they should be able to defy gravity enough to land from a great height at a mere 30 degrees to the horizontal without breaking their suspension or driveshafts, and continue to turn even after front side collisions which would leave bushes and pinions bent (or wheels set to cambers which would normally cause them to no longer turn). They might even get speed boosts beyond the maximum engineering speed expected for the motor, gas and gearbox actually installed.
For an added bonus, they could have critically wounded people in the back, and an accomplice who absolutely has to jump out at 40mph somewhere mid course in order to continue some secret mission.
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What DARPA wants is a combat-ready system that can drive cross-country with little or no outside help.
Different problems, and they require different solutions, and a system that could pass the DARPA test would be overkill and unsuitable for the daily commute to work.
I suppose that depends on what one considers a combat zone; dealing with "drivers" who are busy eating a bagel, reading the paper, drinking coffee, talking on a cell phone, shaving, and putting on makeup might require a combat-ready system.
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I think this is pretty cool and all as an engineering effort, but what specific purpose does this have?
Autonomous dump trucks with carrying capacities of 100+ tonnes of ore have been in use in open pit mining operations for several years now. At the moment, it's complex and expensive to set up the control systems for them. More intelligent operation with lower start-up costs will definitely interest the big mining companies.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In case every forgot , their job is to kill people more efficiently. I seriously doubt any amount of money sunk into this will enable robots to kill more than humans on america's highways. What does the military need a robo-car for anyway?
No matter where you go , there you are.
I'm a member of the Cornell team. I've decided not to post our site, knowing that it would receive a brutal Slashdotting, but here are a couple of the off-site press releases.
m l2 005 /03/02/42255e9b352d0n ews/display.v/ART/2005 /02/24/421d88d386293e ws/25/7487/
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041216/sfth012_1.ht
http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/
http://www.cornellsun.com/v
http://www.automotive.com/n
Feel free to Google us and come visit our site.
Here's the link to CU. (Go Big Red!!)
Here's the link to CMU.
It's interesting, 50 undergrads took the course in 2003 at Caltech that did technology surveys for the vehicle, and there are about 1000 undergrads at Caltech total. So, 5% of the undergraduate population took part ...
One of our biggest problems in Silicon Valley has been finding a big open space in which to test. We now have access to a huge parking lot built during the dot-com boom, adjacent to an unfinished building complex. So we have the Overbot winding in and out among the parking islands. We'll be testing there today in a few hours.
In terms of technology, Team DAD probably is most innnovative. Everything runs on digital signal processors. They're building their own laser rangefinder this year. Last year, they got further than anybody else without wrecking. (CMU crashed three times; their HUMMV was able to survive the first two.)
Nobody seems to have a breakthrough in sensing. (By this I mean sensing good enough to evaluate terrain. Detecting big, solid obstacles is trivial.) LIDAR line scanners are too limited, stereo vision doesn't register well on dirt, and strong intelligent vision processing requires a breakthrough that twenty years of research has failed to produce. The breakthrough needed is flash LIDAR, which exists, but wasn't ready soon enough for this year's Grand Challenge. (The rules prohibit the use of Government-funded patented technology not available for general sale by last August, and the good flash LIDAR wasn't available in time.) CMU has a LIDAR line scanner on a giant gimbal, and we have a LIDAR line scanner on an overly large tilt head, but that's an interim solution and a technical dead end.
On the other hand, GPS and inertial gear gets better and cheaper every year. It's surprising how good it is.
This year, everybody who makes it to the starting line should disappear over the horizon at the start. The minimal level of performance to make it through the "site visit" hurdle is above that demonstrated by most of the vehicles entered last year.
And this year, DARPA is putting tank traps on the course.
Don't forget the Ripsaw used by TeamTMT. Their vehicle looks much cooler, and more fun to drive, than the wimpy one from UMass Dartmouth. All they need to do is figure out that AI problem and they're done...