Tom's Looks at Two DARPA Grand Challengers

skeeball writes "As a follow-up to this article, Tom's Hardware has a behind the scenes article on two of the teams competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005. "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the first Grand Challenge Project last year, offering a reward of $1 million. This year, the prize money has been doubled, making the competition all the more interesting.""

Comments

Big money in defence

[mfloy]

This just goes to show all the money that is being tossed at defence research. If you can even give the smallest example of how your research can be used for defense you are almost guarenteed to get grant money. I know many researchers who do just that just to get their projects funded.

Re:Big money in defence

[fjf33]

And you think that 1 million dollar is a waste? That is probably the best money DARPA has spent. They are getting a LOT more than 1 million dollars worth of reaserch by doings this. The field was advanced more in these two years than ever before. I much rather they do this than give the money to some University so that a graduate student can waste it. Whenever there is a competition people get innovative. I think this is great. Besides DARPA's reason of being is to put money into things that no private enterprize would. Things that have no direct application in the next 10 years or so but that seed the field for the private industry to pick from there and make a project that they think they can make money in 2 to 3 years which is the maximum horizon for private industry.

Re:Big money in defence

[mbius]

I much rather they do this than give the money to some University so that a graduate student can waste it.

Psst...Don't let on I told you this...(leans in close)...that's where scientists come from.

Article Link

[Kozz]

Too bad the submitter didn't Link the Article itself.

Re:Article Link

[zardor]

They'll probably get it right tomorrow in the dupe.

Semantics

[Savatte]

This year, the prize money has been doubled, making the competition all the more interesting

um, how does more prize money make the competition itself more interesting?

However...

[lightyear4]

...it would be a MUCH more interesting contest if the teams did better than the last time around. (the best team only got 7 miles out of 175 total.)

I wish the best of luck to all of those competing.

The Line up is not complete!

[locokamil]

Just so all you geeks out there know, the final lineup for the DARPA GC has not been decided yet.

Several teams with extremely competent designs will be site tested by DARPA officials during the week of August 15th.

Keep your eyes on the Princeton University team (disclaimer: I'm heavily involved in developing software and lasers for them). We barely missed the cut in April, but we're gearing up for the second round of qualification tests in August. We've taken an approach very different from the other teams (we love to hate on CMU and Stanford for their bloated budgets and hardware), insofar that we've refused to let our budget rise over $40000. Furthermore, our work is done ENTIRELY by a team of six undergraduates, three of whom are freshmen (I'm the only senior on the team).

Is this a shameless plug for the Princeton team? Hell yeah. But I just felt that it should be known that there are people in this competition who are trying to THINK their way out of the maze instead of BUYING their way out of it.

Re:The Line up is not complete!

[locokamil]

Off the shelf hardware: we use one P4 3.2Ghz for general control, and an Athlon64 3800+ for vision processing.

Software wise, it's a bit of a hodgepodge-- we fully recognize the need to clean it up. The control comp is using Windows Server 2003, and most of it is written in C#, simply because it helps us to develop interfaces with our control hardware quickly.

The vision computer runs gentoo Linux, 2.6.12 kernel. All the vision code is written in C-- simply because that's what most of us are most comfortable with. Whether or not we port our C code to C#, or back port our C# code to C remains to be seen.

Notable features? We use three primary sensors: GPS, Vision (stereo and single lens cameras) and LIDAR. We take immense pride in the fact that our primary lane detection camera is a $100 webcam operating at 640x480 resolution. Our design is robust enough that the car can continue on its merry way even if two of the three primary sensors are taken out of action.

We absolutely refused to shell out 10K (250K in some cases) for a commerical LIDAR solution. We basically built, stabilized and hardened our own LIDAR. The judges are out on whether or not its better than commercially available solutions, but it certainly equals any (reasonably priced) solution out there-- and my buddy and I built it for only 2.5K.

Algorithm-wise, we're taking the mountaineer option instead of the God option. That means that we're using genetic optimization techniques in conjunction with kalman filters to 'grow' our way around obstacles and stay within bounds instead of detecting every single obstacle in an x km radius, plotting it and calculating splines/best possible courses through the minefield. The three inexperienced freshmen came up with this solution... and in most of our benchmarks, it doesn't take more than 45% of our control CPU's power to use this algorithm.

We're not trying for overkill. Our objective when we started the project was to find out what was *just* enough to get past the course. This means that we've been able to keep our costs under control.

I'd direct you to our website... but we've not had the time to put one up. Eventually, we'll get around to it-- but right now, the car has taken priority.

That's so Tom's Hardware

[Animats]

That's so Tom's Hardware. "7 Pentium M CPUs!", and no word about the algorithms. They could have at least said more about the sensors. Actually, everybody's sensors suck. The radars can't profile terrain, the LIDAR units are only line scanners, the stereo vision systems have trouble locking up on dirt, and the vision systems are a long way from being intelligent. True 3D LIDAR is coming, but not this year. The Grand Challenge rules prohibit the use of the best available 3D LIDAR system, because it was developed with Government funding and wasn't available by August of last year.

So we have a line-scanning LIDAR on a tilt head, like CMU, which is an adequate but bulky solution..

We have two industrial Pentium 4 machines running QNX, on our Grand Challenge entry, along with five Galil programmable motor controllers. We have room for 3 CPUs, but the compute load fit on two of them, so we took the third one out.

Technically, QNX was an excellent choice, but because few people know it and many don't want to learn it, using it has made recruiting difficult.

Re:That's so Tom's Hardware

[Animats]

Why is the vision processing so poor?

Because, despite decades of work, vision processing of unstructured scenes still sucks.

There are things that work in computer vision. You can do stereo, if the image has strong edges in it. You can pick out big moving objects. You can find the horizon. You can work out your own positional movements from video. You can find faces, align, and recognize them, sort of. You can find known objects in any orientation (which is very useful in industrial systems.) You can follow roads.

Beyond that, not much works.

Re:They also pictured the wrong vehicle

[brilinux]

Yeah. Stupid Sandstorm almost ran me over in the Morewood parking lot. It was pretty cool, though, almost getting run over by a high tech robotic military vehicle. Makes for a great story.

Re:The developments won't be used for "defence".

[QuantumG]

Shall we get into this? It doesn't matter if the US military has painted the streets with gold in Iraq. Your military invaded a sovereign nation. The world isn't safer now than it was before the US went and did this, as evidenced by the military build up in the pacific. Your government has shown that it is willing to break international law and other sovereign nations (like North Korea, Taiwan and China) are taking preemptive measures to ensure that your military wont do it again. That puts all of us at risk. The US deployment of nuclear arms to staging positions in South Korea has been condemed by everyone in the region and has resulted in declarations of willingness to use nuclear weapons from all her neighbours. That doesn't make the world a safer place, it makes the world a dangerous war charged place. The kind of place that helps the people who run your country sell the goods that are made by companies they work for. The people of Iraq didn't want your help. They didn't want you to bomb them. They didn't want their system of government removed and replaced with the travesty that you call democracy. Even if your government were just trying to make the world a better place, the ends do not, have not and never will justify the means.