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Inside DARPA's Robot Race

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the ghost-cars dept.

Belfegor writes "The PBS series Nova has a great feature on their website, regarding the coverage of the DARPA-sponsored 'Robot Race' in which driverless vehicles 'competed' in a 130-mile race across the Mojave Desert. The full show is available on the website, and besides that they have plenty more information about the robotics behind the challenge, and also some pretty cool out-takes from the show."

3 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Seen it by Moby+Cock · · Score: 5, Informative

    PBS broadcast that show last night. While I realise that is is a little 2001 to actually watch a program when it is braodcast, I did. And I really enjoyed it. I am hardly current on the status of autonomous robotics and I was pleasantly surprised by how far along the technology is. 130 miles through the dessert using only GPS and local sensors is a pretty amazing feat, and that course was tough. It features mountain switchbacks, tunnels and other hazards. If you even have a passing interest in robotics I recommend watching the show.

  2. torrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.mininova.org/tor/266446

  3. Re:Fascinating program by SpyPlane · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do a google search on Sabastian Thrun, he was the team lead for Stanford, and formally at CMU (what a non-coincidence). Most of the software they used on Stanly (Stanford's bot) was either written by Sebastian in his former research or taken from experience gained on CMU's team the previous year. The ladar mapping he used, I know I saw on some former page of his that had all the gory algorithm details. It might just take a little bit of searching. He also has a c library out there somewhere that does a lot of this stuff, but I can't seem to find it now.

    One paper that's of interest might be here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/thrun/pu blic_html/papers/thrun.ces-tr.html (sorry, no linky, writing in a hurry)

    And that paper is mentioned in the readme of the BFL (Bayesian Filtering Library) found here:
    http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~kgadeyne/software/ bfl-trunk/

    Lastly, at one point all of us competitors were required to give our design documents to DARPA, and they put them up on their webpage here:
    http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge05/techpapers.h tml

    BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.

    --
    "We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"