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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.'"

4 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Must be a marvel of engineering... by HermanAB · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not really - Joysticks are rather common in aircraft and many moons ago GM built a Cadillac with a joystick as a test vehicle, but they found it too hard to control.

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    Oh well, what the hell...
  2. Re:Wow by MustardMan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    While I agree that xcode is an awesome development environment, there's nothing to stop the designers from using xcode on their desktops, then compiling and running the code on another *nix on the embedded computers in the robot. You can use xcode without using any apple-specific extensions, and because it's mostly a frontend to existing GNU tools, it's very easy to write console apps that work on both platforms without any tweaking. I do a similar thing on a daily basis - tweak my code in xcode, then upload it to a linux cluster to crunch numbers.

  3. Maybe... by Mechcozmo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Why did they choose Macs? by Fahrvergnuugen · · Score: 2, Interesting
    From one of the developers, originally posted on clubtouareg.com

    "The software architecture is totally object-oriented. We're using Objective-C and Cocoa to write all custom software to parse the serial datastreams, process the information, and monitor the whole process.

    We have total tie-in to Touareg's CANbus and came up with algorithms to reverse-engineer the header codes. For example, we can plot in real-time (up to 100Hz) the independent rotation rate of each wheel and compare it the axle rotation rate and the GPS datastream (10 cm accuracy updated at 10Hz).

    The computers are task dedicated pre-processing machines which talk to each other using a wired network (race rules prohibit any kind of wireless - to prevent any remote control "cheating"). The computers are called Navigator, Tactician, and Driver.

    For debugging purposes we have a wireless router that sends all that information to our chase vehicle ('Lisa'). All that information, plus an "e-stop" switch is displayed on our custom"Dashboard" app.



    Lots of fun stuff. "

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