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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.'"

36 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. I, for one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...welcome our OS X-powered autonomous vehicle overlords.

  2. Must be a marvel of engineering... by Laivincolmo · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...with only a single pedal for both acceleration and braking...

    1. Re:Must be a marvel of engineering... by Suburbanpride · · Score: 4, Funny

      technicaly, there are three accelerators on a car the gas pedal provides positive acceleration, the brake provides negative acceleration and the steering wheel allwos for lateral acceleration.

      --
      sorry 'bout the mess...
    2. 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.

      --
      Oh well, what the hell...
    3. Re:Must be a marvel of engineering... by Seumas · · Score: 2, Funny

      Someone shoudl build a beowolf cluster of these.

    4. Re:Must be a marvel of engineering... by FuturePastNow · · Score: 2

      That's all right, power users can plug in a two pedal brake/accelerator and it works just fine. The single pedal is so elderly drivers don't get confused.

      --
      Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
  3. Fruit-flavoured Victory. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    ""Apple technology drives a new fully-autonomous vehicle developed for a major U.S. competition."

    Woo Hoo! Cars run on Apple juice.

  4. 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 mrseigen · · Score: 2, Informative

      Judging from the site, they just really seem to like Macs. Either that, or there were a few sitting around after they kitted out the lab that nobody was using, so they did an "intradepartmental relocation" under cover of night.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

      --
      "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
    4. Re:Why did they choose Macs? by dourk · · Score: 2, Funny

      Automator. Like, duh!

      --
      Wake up.
    5. 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.

      --
      Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
    6. 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. "

      --
      Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
  5. Guffaw Guffaw by Lord+Marlborough · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's biggest advantage is that it gets to start off several years ahead of any windows machines... Ha Ha... hmmmmm :-(

  6. Meanwhile... by Tiberius_Fel · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

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    Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
    1. Re:Meanwhile... by Soul-Burn666 · · Score: 2, Funny

      But don't forget linux does infinite loops in 5 seconds (according to Linus :)

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      ^_^
    2. Re:Meanwhile... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, it's obviously the Mac car that drives in an infinite loop.

    3. Re:Meanwhile... by ZorbaTHut · · Score: 5, Funny

      The Mac car puttered along at 5mph, but damn did it look pretty.

      The SCO car just clamped onto the back of the Linux car for the entire race.

      The Amiga car was a marvel of engineering, but fell into a ditch two miles in.

      And the Hurd car will be ready to race any day now. Really.

      --
      Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
    4. Re:Meanwhile... by Seumas · · Score: 2, Funny

      The Solaris car wound up going off the track and didn't stop till it reached India.

    5. Re:Meanwhile... by Seumas · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, the Linux car never left the start-line, because RMS stood in front of it and refused to move unless they started calling it the GNU/Linux car.

  7. Which of the Tiger features are they using? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    My money's on Dashboard...

  8. 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?

    --
    My other car is first.
    1. Re:Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      > what specific Aqua/Cocoa feature was used here?

      OS X isn't just a nice environment for users, it's an awesome environment for many coders. If they're like the many coders who love xcode, then xcode may have been that aqua/cocoa feature used as a big part of the development process, rather an important part of the resulting product.

    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.

  9. An obvious choice by civman2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  10. Very cool, more information.. by Sv-Manowar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Very cool, more information.. by Buran · · Score: 2, Informative

      vwvortex.com has more info, too. I heard of this there first.

      I, Touareg, indeed ...

      --
      i am a soviet space shuttle
  11. 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.

    1. Re:In other news... by sokoban · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hey, they have a better market share among Grand Challenge entries than they do on the desktop.

      --
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  12. Buckaroo! by invisigoth · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dr. Lizardo surrenders.

    IMDB

  13. Automator! by robolemon · · Score: 3, Funny

    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,

  14. 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
  15. And the most amazing thing is... by SteeldrivingJon · · Score: 2, Funny


    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
  16. 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.

  17. They exist. by SeaFox · · Score: 3, Informative

    [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.