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The European Grand Challenge
An anonymous reader writes "A European version of the DARPA Grand Challenge is being held in Germany next month. Instead of a race through the desert, the EU challenge is split into three events. Urban, non-urban, and landmine detection will be the 'courses', with multiple winners in each event. Interestingly Sebastian Thrun, winner of last year's Challenge, has been forbidden from taking part despite being a European citizen." From the article: "The trials will take place in and around Hammelburg, a mockup of a town used by the German military for training exercises. In the non-urban course the robots will have to contend with a one-kilometer route containing ditches, barbed wire fences, cattle guards, fires, narrow underpasses, and inclines of up to 40 degrees. The urban and landmine 500-meter trials will require the robots to negotiate doorways, stairs, partially collapsed buildings, and poor visibility from smoke or partial lighting. Along the way, they will also have to search for designated objects and report their findings back to base."
Those are being developed. iRobot PackBot, Foster Miller Talon, Remotec Mini Andros. They are controlled by human operators, have a coulple cameras and are being testing with explosive detection devices. The robots I mentioned are more or less designed to disable the IED after they are found, but companies are making add-ons that aid in detecting IEDs in the field.
One of the main military policies of the US is to be an early adopter and thus on the forefront of every military technology (pratically every technology, besides eco-related :-)) , therefore EU or any other will always be copying the US in some way
:-) (USSR first adopters) ... FYI: works like this: you activate beacon, signal picked up by sat. relayed to ground, emergency services signaled and confirmation to beacon is relayed back.
:-(
Some comments on the EU Galileo (GAL) project and differencies to GPS (Nav Sys / US):
- GAL - Civilian (public and pay services), GPS - (public and military services)
- GAL works in cojunction with GPS and GLONASS (Russia), GPS is not meant to work with other systems (first adopter)
- GAL and GPS both are augmented by overlayer system like WAAS and EGNOS
- GAL has a rescue service with return link (SAR Beacon), this is actually 'copied' from GLONASS
- GAL has an important integrity signal relayed with nav.signal, to tell uses if the system is actually performing, nice to know if your placing a 100 ton concrete slap (EU first adopters)
- GAL will work well over most of the globe, GPS has places where the constellation is sub-optimal (like nothern EU contries), GLONASS is very poor at the moment.
Basically there is some copying going on, but I would say it's more a re-working with a broader perspective. The main point is Galileo is non-military, not hooked up to an early-response-system, and not hooked up to an total-annihilation system
Yes, I'm European and work in the Galileo project, call me French if you like (but I'm not).