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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.""
Too bad the submitter didn't Link the Article itself.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
...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.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.
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.
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.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.