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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.'"

19 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.

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      sorry 'bout the mess...
  3. 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 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?
  4. 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 :-(

  5. 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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    1. Re:Meanwhile... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

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

    2. 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.
    3. 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.

  6. 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!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

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    Business Voyeur
  9. Buckaroo! by invisigoth · · Score: 3, Funny

    Dr. Lizardo surrenders.

    IMDB

  10. 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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  11. 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,

  12. 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.

  13. 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.