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.'"

Comments

Why did they choose Macs?

[intmainvoid]

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!

Re:Why did they choose Macs?

[MoonBuggy]

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.

Re:Why did they choose Macs?

[ztirffritz]

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.