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Mac OS X Drives Grand Challenge Entry

Posted by Zonk on from the apples-for-brains dept.

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.'"

9 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Alternative headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful



    Pentagon backed competition (DARPA) recruits American schoolchildren to design its next generation of automated killing machines

    funny how different words can chill the reality

  2. Why did they choose Macs? by intmainvoid · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Unfortunately the article doesn't expand on why they chose Macs. It'd be interesting to know if that was just what they were familiar with, or if they choose it for some specific reason.

    It's not like they'd be making use of spotlight or having a dashboard widget drive the car!

    --
    Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
    1. Re:Why did they choose Macs? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I did think the same thing - I'm typing on a Mac and judging by your sig you like them too, but there are some places that you don't need ease of use or a solid interface. Having said that, three of the team are previous NeXT/Apple software developers - if it's what they know then there's a good chance they can code faster for OSX than Linux/BSD and they can also probably take advantage of some nice features either of the PowerPC architecture or of OSX itself.

    2. Re:Why did they choose Macs? by tm2b · · Score: 2, Insightful

      In their place, the main reason I'd select it (beyond liking Mac OS X) would be hardware - Mac mini motherboards cheaply pack a lot of punch with very modest space and power demands while not leaving a lot of device driver issues to worry about.

      There's also support for some realtime features in Mac OS X, but Linux can do that too.

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      "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
    3. Re:Why did they choose Macs? by ztirffritz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I read about this somewhere else. If I remember correctly, some of the key members of their team were NeXT developers so they know OS X pretty intimately. That would be the only reason to use OS X for this task, unless you were give financial assistance from Apple.

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      Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
  3. Wow by jrockway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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'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 :), 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?

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    My other car is first.
  4. In other news... by CosmeticLobotamy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  5. Why the focus on OS? by puusism · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!"

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    - Ismo
  6. What's the big deal? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.