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Mac OS X Drives Grand Challenge Entry
Anonymous Coward writes "Apple technology drives a new fully-autonomous vehicle developed for a major U.S. competition. From the article: 'Team Banzai is one of just 40 teams selected from 118 entrants from around North America to have made it through to the semi-finals of the 2005 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge.'"
...welcome our OS X-powered autonomous vehicle overlords.
...with only a single pedal for both acceleration and braking...
""Apple technology drives a new fully-autonomous vehicle developed for a major U.S. competition."
Woo Hoo! Cars run on Apple juice.
Pentagon backed competition (DARPA) recruits American schoolchildren to design its next generation of automated killing machines
funny how different words can chill the reality
It's not like they'd be making use of spotlight or having a dashboard widget drive the car!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
It's biggest advantage is that it gets to start off several years ahead of any windows machines... Ha Ha... hmmmmm :-(
The Linux car drove in a never-ending circle (infinite loop), the Solaris car barely got moving at speed, and the Windows car crashed into a tree... :P
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
My money's on Dashboard...
I used to believe that slashdot didn't run slashvertisements, but now I know I'm wrong. How is this news for nerds? It's just "propaganda for apple". What would be news for nerds would be a profile of the competition and the non OS X entries. But no, all we get is an article about how good Apple is because some robot is run by their OS. Great.
:), I don't see the point of running embedded systems with OS X. OS X is a nice OS because of the usability factor. But a control system doesn't need a shiny GUI and integration with your iPod. So I think FreeBSD or Linux might have been a better choice... what specific Aqua/Cocoa feature was used here?
I'll also note that the same article has been on Apple's "start page" (the default site for Safari) for over a week.
Staying on topic
My other car is first.
If I were designed a car, I'd want to be sure it had a dashboard too!
And since it's autonomous, it doesn't need any Windows!
Heck, the G5 already looks like it could be substituted out for various engine parts, or at least fit in with most modern "blocks" under the hood.
why didnt they see, what they can do using linux? :\ beats me.
There's more information from Team Banzai on 'Dora' the self-driving touareg at their official website, including pictures of the three mini macs & networking hardware that drive the car. Considering some of the other competitors are entering in Hummer H1's, their choice of a relatively sane offroader (VW Touareg) could be very interesting. There are also interesting technical discussions over on the Club Touareg forums.
Business Voyeur
Does Microsoft plan to enter a vehicle running Windows Vista? I wouldn't mistake the red on the windshield for a Red Screen Of Death (RSOD). It just might be a Mac user who got splattered. :P
Lets just get it out of the way- Of course they didn't use windows- then it would have crashed...
Anyhow, I remember back in the day when the LOGO turtle was the height of tech- and we would do little programs on Apples also.
Does the DARPA entry have an iPod adapter?
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
i've wondered what the link between apple and volkswagen is. their ads have a similar feel. the ipod and beetle were paired. osx on a toureg. anyone care to shed some light?
that's all it is if you ask me.
can't imagine the OS used playing any role in such a setting.
don't think the autonomous vehicle needs e.g. the
new "strong desktop search tool"
In other news, 39 out of 40 Grand Challenge Entries not OSX driven.
I love OSX and everything, but this isn't exactly something to be proud of.
Dr. Lizardo surrenders.
IMDB
The reason for chosing OSX is pretty simple.
If you're going to crash, you get a rather soothing message on your windshield, saying something went wrong.
On the plus side, if you're running with classic mode enabled, you also get a sadface prior to when all hell breaks loose.
qwack
IRAQ (AP) - MacMini driven HUMVEE, armed with .50 Cal machine gun, jump starts apple's new switcher campaign. Female insurgent, Ahbudla Muhamda 22, says, "The thing just works, I was on the PC and it was like beep, beep, beep, beep, then bam, like from no where this thing, like, obliterates my Dell with, like a, storm of bullets. I switched and fast." Terrorists, according to local reports, are scared shitless and rumors suggest the whole insurgency is being hamstrung without computers.
Good thing this vehicle is autonomous. Otherwise they would want to equip it with an Apple escapePod.
Okay, so one of the machines uses OSX. What do the others use? If this machine had won, it would be a diffrent story, but here all we see is that it one particular machine runs OSX. Who cares? God slashdot sucks these days.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
...I'm actually following these days (next to the Space Shuttle).
;)
So is there any place I can place my bets on which team is going to win?
I'd bet on Team Red over the OS X but only because they have two entries
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
A car of such kind running Linux isn't news anymore, in the sense that it's expected to do so, we've already seen Linux running on all kind of cars and many devices before that its use is seen as normal and almost isn't worth noting anymore, ie. it's what we are all used to see.
A car running Windows wouldn't be news but a joke, be it Windows ME/CE/.not/mobile/xp/vista/whatever.
I don't know the real technology behind the 'Powered by OS X' of the car, if it's using some OS X-only tools or anything like that.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
Moron.
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
Dupe.
Of course they built an autonomous vehicle with Mac OS X! It has Automator! Just drag and drop the Chess AI engine onto a car and you should be good to go!
All this talk of coding, and they didn't even need to do any!
Silly slashdotters!
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
god this story has been beat to death. Get over it already. CHRIST.
And now for a collection of movie references:
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Laugh while you can, OS X-bashing monkey boys!
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Where are they going?
THE DARPA GRAND CHALLENGE!
When?
REAL SOON!!!
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Which member is Pecos? Or is Pecos still in Tibet?
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Maybe it'll get to its destination by traveling *through* the obstacles!
---
I'm sure that at at least one point in the building process, someone said "No no no, don't tug on that, you never know what it might be attached to!"
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Does the computer driving the car wear a ninja headband?
Sorry if those were all horrible...I tried.
I don't see why the operating system is relevant for design like this. As far as this challenge goes, the innovation is in the application which drives the vehicle, not in the operating system. I believe that any modern OS would be stable enough and offer the relevant services (real-time scheduling etc.) for such an application. The same applies for coding environment mentioned in the article: there isn't an IDE or design model for OS X which is qualitatively better than an IDE or design model for any other major OS -- these things are OS-independent. Actually, the whole article (and the way it was posted) seems to be just a marketing plug for Apple. "See, OS X can drive a car!"
- Ismo
What's the big deal? I'm sure some vehicles are powered by Linux and some by Windows, but there aren't any articles saying "Wow! robotic cars powered by windows!".
Sounds like it's just another stupid PR campaign by Apple to try to convince people that Apple is on the edge of technology when if you look into it, the other OS's have been doing it for a while.
The most amazing thing is that they did it all in Interface Builder without any code.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
This is way off topic, but what would happen when it crash-restarts and you hear that startup tone? That could be fun!
It was because the 3 Minis use ~60W of power each? Also, the Minis are really light. Weight and power-savings might have influenced their decision.
...Kleenex to wipe the oil off their hands after working on their car. That's not newsworthy either.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Announcer: . . . And at the 46-mile marker, Team Banzai has pulled ahead! Team Banzai has just passed Team Caltech to take the lead in the DARPA Grand Challenge! Look at it go!
[...]
Wait, what happening? Ladies and gentlemen, the Team Banzai car has suddenly frozen up. And it looks like there's a rainbow-colored wheel spinning above it!
[Must be a marvel of engineering...] ...with only a single pedal for both acceleration and braking...
There's an amusement park in my area with these.
They are small cars (look a little like miniture Model-T's, I think they use go cart engies in them). Anyway, there's a course of a half mile or so where the cars run on a rail with limited manuveability (one rail down the middle of track, gliders on the left and right underside edge of the car to keep it from completely leaving the track). The cars only have one pedal. You push down to accelate (not a high range of speed, this is a kiddie ride), and when you take your foot completely off the gas a brake applies.
Because of the new and ever improving (arguably) frameworks that come with the most recent versions of OS X. Not to mention the IDE (Xcode). It is just a nice, out of the box package for doing development. It doesn't have to mean that. But it does.
Since they have to analyze a lot of data, maybe using the AltiVec engine in the PPC and/or the additional processing made available using Core Image frameworks (for processing images gathered by radar, laser, GPS, etc. made their work easier, cheaper, faster, etc. If they start out with a base Linux or BSD install, those frameworks are not available. Believe it or not, there is much more to OS X than just a pretty interface.
I've thought it was iPod Shuffle.
They would have to have another autonomous vehicle attached to this one to carry the batteries :) (allright, I'll go out now)
Ball matching frenzy for MacOS X: http://www.funpause.com/atlantis/
Old news my friends. Someone better get the Apple RSS feed.
Because I have low karma, I need pills.
Posted by Hisham on 23:11 Saturday 23 July 2005
/. is still a Linux-oriented website.)
from the penguins-for-brains dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Linux technology drives a new fully-autonomous vehicle developed for a major U.S. competition. From the article: 'While enterprise and desktop discussions grab headlines, Linux is quietly infiltrating into much more mundane applications -- such as running the on-board computers of the University of Central Florida's entry for the DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous, unmanned vehicle competition. Prof. Kien Hua of the College of Engineering and Computer Science heads up the UCF program as team leader.'"
(Straight from the Bizarro World, where
The filesystem is the package manager
Saying OSX powers this vehicle is about the same as saying that the NASA canteen in Houston powers the Space Shuttle. It's nice to see that a relatively prestigious project runs on OSX, but OSX doesn't make any real contribution to the task at hand. Or did I miss something in Tiger's 200 new features?
As has been noted elsewhere, Objective C is a little more difficult to set up on Linux or BSD, and somewhat less functional.
And, as noted in TFriendlyA, they are using Objective C rather extensively.
in case you haven't picked that up elsewhere, yet.
Perhaps they are also using Remote Desktop (or whatever that is) to make monitoring more, er, intuitive? The remote would not be a determing feature, but the integration with Objective C would.
And I'm wondering about the lack of OS 9 jokes.
about OS-9?
Maybe I just haven't read far enough yet.
A few comments on the Objective C angle and a lot of complaints that the OS shouldn't matter by people who apparently missed the Objective C angle or perhaps assume that the GNU support for Objective C is equal to the Darwin/Cocoa support for Objective C.
And nobody seems to be reaching for jokes about Microware's (Radisys) OS-9.
Maybe Microware should have tried harder to defend their trademark after all.
and it won't compile anything untill it downloads the 750 meg develoeper tools package. Fire up the airport!
The article says "Power Mac G5s running OS X inside the car"... yet the pictures on the website show that it is actually controlled by 3 Mac Minis. Since when do they make G5 minis? :)
http://evoketv.com - TV Listings 2.0
I did submit this, and it was rejected.
The filesystem is the package manager
drove a forklift once that had just that. very weird experience...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
What are the other entries running?
That autonomous vehicle seems snappier than the rest!