PS3 Enters DARPA Urban Challenge

billdar writes "Terrasoft Solutions posted an article on their development of a stereo vision object detection system built upon Sony's PS3 for Axion Racing's entry into the DARPA Urban Challenge. The PS3 running Yellow Dog Linux replaced one of the on-board Dell servers to process the realtime stereoscopic sensor data. The whole system was developed and integrated onto the vehicle in ten days. So far, Spirit has been making the competition's highlight reels."

Comments

Re:Another Reason to Buy One!

[Nursie]

PS3 now outselling Xbox by quite a margin in europe

So shut the hell up already. The PS3 is doing just fine, despite what y'all naysayers are moaning about.

Re:Problems under the hood

[billdar]

The examples in the center of the page are snapshots from the first field test when the truck was moving.

Basically, the PS3 grabs a handle and opens a data connection to each camera. Thats the slowest part of the system. The reads are done simultaneously in different threads. Pulling the next frames require both current reads to complete first. Grabbing the data from the cameras is limited by USB bandwidth and the capture speed of the cameras.

That ends up giving you a worst-case sync deviation of ~10ms. Which is not too bad considering the source is an off the shelf webcam, but it does limit the max speed the system is useful.