That's one of the best articles I've seen on this event.
I run one of the Grand Challenge teams,
Team Overbot.
We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding,
equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
We need three more good programmers in Silicon Valley. "No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize." If you're interested, we want to see 1000 lines of C++ you're proud of. You'll need to put in at least 250 hours between now and March. Click here to join.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and
without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines.
All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the
morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
Post questions and I'll answer them here.
Jim Stevens
Team Overbot
Just a few thoughts on Baxter himself
on
Coalescent
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Stephen Baxter deals in big concepts: just how big only becomes obvious at the end of Coalescent, the first of three books planned for the Destiny's Children series. Split between the story of Regina, a child living at the collapse of the western Roman empire, and our world now, Coalescent jumps the historical gap with a religious order which has, over the millennia, become something very different - something post-human.
One of Baxter's key abilities is to make the apparently impossible suddenly seem simple with a few well-chosen scientific examples. Coalescent is still recognisably hard SF, but the characters are more closely observed than usual; the scene where a man sees the scribbled notes of his recently dead father, along with the cup he will never pick up again, is almost cruel in its clarity. It's been said for years that Baxter is the natural successor to Arthur C Clarke, but on a good day, he's better than that.
That's one of the best articles I've seen on this event.
I run one of the Grand Challenge teams,
Team Underbot.
We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding,
equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
We need three more good programmers in Silicon Valley. "No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize." If you're interested, we want to see 1000 lines of C++ you're proud of. You'll need to put in at least 250 hours between now and March. Click here to join.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and
without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines.
All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the
morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
I work for a cable ISP, and I set up an Allot NetEnforcer to do some packet-shaping.
The P2P apps just KILL us, and really any other broadband provider. I throttled that shit down to 16 kilobytes/sec down/8 kb/sec up (per user), and watched in amazement as network utilization by 40% during peak hours. And so far, no one has complained. Keep in mind that I throttled ONLY P2P stuff.
It's not that we want to screw you, but the truth is that P2P apps use up more than their share. E-mail and web pages and even games are a higher priority.
It's all kind of a moot point anyway. I expect that within the next year or so, most ISPs will simply block all the P2P stuff to avoid the legal hassles.
OK, I'm bored, since my office is dead due to the little wind storm going on, so I'll take a long walk of this short intellectual pier for fun...
Let me start by saying: (1) Yes, I am a lawyer; (2) yes I think these lawsuits are silly; (3) I don't believe the parents have a very good chance of winning.
Whenever this issue comes up, there is the inevitable deluge of virulent "where were the parents!" and "why weren't you teaching your kids values" type posts/comments/rants. Despite the mind numbing banality of most of these, people seem to continue to harp on about it over and over.
What I find particularly interesting is the attempt to ascribe these types of lawsuits to "liberals" and "the left", and the rabid conservative mantra that liberals have "destroyed personal responsibility." (Like fiscal responsibility? largest deficit in history)
I am wary of these "where were the parents" type simplifications. It seems to me that these are all based on a mythical image of the American Family that is taken straight from 1950's television, and has little (or no) bearing on today's society. Where were the parents? Working two jobs that require 60+ hours a week so they can continue to enjoy the "middle class" life in some suburban development near a semi-decent school. By the time Mom & Dad have come home at 6:00 or 7:00 pm and made dinner, they are probably way too strung out from a 14 hour day to be providing much useful moral guidance.
Don't get me wrong, I support working Mom's and Dads. My family is a two-job deal, but we are lucky in that, because I have a high-priced legal education, we can afford full time child care for our tots. Most parents in the U.S. can't do that.
Meanwhile the kids are sitting around at home from 3pm when schools let out, thanks to shorter school days brought about by reduced budgets. There aren't too many organized, safe after school programs anymore (especially for kids who aren't athletic, or aren't into sports, which I'd be a large number of/.'ers can relate to).
Sure, 99% of the people smart enough to read this site were smart enough to separate fact from fancy at a pretty young age. But ask yourself: didn't you do anything stupid at the age of 14 (or 24) that you now look back on and go "whoa...I was an idiot..." The thing maturity brings is an ability to think through the potential consequences of your actions. That's what "learning from experience" is all about. Now, none of us (hopefully) ever decided to shoot at trucks on the highway. But I'll bet a few people here tossed things off an overpass...or put things on the train tracks...or stole a stop sign (guilty)...or any of a hundred things that could have caused serious injury. The kids involved in the GTA case are probably particularly sub-par in the brains department, but they didn't set out to hurt people, they just didn't consider that if you shoot at the side of a truck (a supposedly destructive but not dangerous act) it might have dire consequences if you MISS. (After all, how many of us miss all that often using the sniper rifle in GTA?) So, bad decision on their part.
People are incensed that TakeTwo and Sony are sued. It is descried as evidence of the out of control courts. However, what conservatives never seem to point out is that almost all of these suits are dismissed early on (and if you dig into the ones that aren't, like the infamous McDonald's coffee case, you find the facts aren't as cut-and-dried as you think). In other words, the courts aren't out of control; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do: adjudicate the rights of parties who feel they have been wronged.
One last (semi-random) point. Someone raised a first amendment issue below. That isn't really relevant here. Whether TakeTwo has a right to publish GTAIII is different from whether they can be held responsible for consequences that naturally flow from their decision to do so. (I'm not saying that shooting at trucks is a natur
Slashdot Mirror
I run one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding, equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines. All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
Post questions and I'll answer them here.
Jim Stevens
Team Overbot
Stephen Baxter deals in big concepts: just how big only becomes obvious at the end of Coalescent, the first of three books planned for the Destiny's Children series. Split between the story of Regina, a child living at the collapse of the western Roman empire, and our world now, Coalescent jumps the historical gap with a religious order which has, over the millennia, become something very different - something post-human.
One of Baxter's key abilities is to make the apparently impossible suddenly seem simple with a few well-chosen scientific examples. Coalescent is still recognisably hard SF, but the characters are more closely observed than usual; the scene where a man sees the scribbled notes of his recently dead father, along with the cup he will never pick up again, is almost cruel in its clarity. It's been said for years that Baxter is the natural successor to Arthur C Clarke, but on a good day, he's better than that.
I run one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Underbot. We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding, equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines. All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
Post questions and I'll answer them here.
Jim Stevens
Team Underbot
I work for a cable ISP, and I set up an Allot NetEnforcer to do some packet-shaping.
The P2P apps just KILL us, and really any other broadband provider. I throttled that shit down to 16 kilobytes/sec down/8 kb/sec up (per user), and watched in amazement as network utilization by 40% during peak hours. And so far, no one has complained. Keep in mind that I throttled ONLY P2P stuff.
It's not that we want to screw you, but the truth is that P2P apps use up more than their share. E-mail and web pages and even games are a higher priority.
It's all kind of a moot point anyway. I expect that within the next year or so, most ISPs will simply block all the P2P stuff to avoid the legal hassles.
Let me start by saying: (1) Yes, I am a lawyer; (2) yes I think these lawsuits are silly; (3) I don't believe the parents have a very good chance of winning.
Whenever this issue comes up, there is the inevitable deluge of virulent "where were the parents!" and "why weren't you teaching your kids values" type posts/comments/rants. Despite the mind numbing banality of most of these, people seem to continue to harp on about it over and over.
What I find particularly interesting is the attempt to ascribe these types of lawsuits to "liberals" and "the left", and the rabid conservative mantra that liberals have "destroyed personal responsibility." (Like fiscal responsibility? largest deficit in history)
I am wary of these "where were the parents" type simplifications. It seems to me that these are all based on a mythical image of the American Family that is taken straight from 1950's television, and has little (or no) bearing on today's society. Where were the parents? Working two jobs that require 60+ hours a week so they can continue to enjoy the "middle class" life in some suburban development near a semi-decent school. By the time Mom & Dad have come home at 6:00 or 7:00 pm and made dinner, they are probably way too strung out from a 14 hour day to be providing much useful moral guidance.
Don't get me wrong, I support working Mom's and Dads. My family is a two-job deal, but we are lucky in that, because I have a high-priced legal education, we can afford full time child care for our tots. Most parents in the U.S. can't do that.
Meanwhile the kids are sitting around at home from 3pm when schools let out, thanks to shorter school days brought about by reduced budgets. There aren't too many organized, safe after school programs anymore (especially for kids who aren't athletic, or aren't into sports, which I'd be a large number of /.'ers can relate to).
Sure, 99% of the people smart enough to read this site were smart enough to separate fact from fancy at a pretty young age. But ask yourself: didn't you do anything stupid at the age of 14 (or 24) that you now look back on and go "whoa...I was an idiot..." The thing maturity brings is an ability to think through the potential consequences of your actions. That's what "learning from experience" is all about. Now, none of us (hopefully) ever decided to shoot at trucks on the highway. But I'll bet a few people here tossed things off an overpass...or put things on the train tracks...or stole a stop sign (guilty)...or any of a hundred things that could have caused serious injury. The kids involved in the GTA case are probably particularly sub-par in the brains department, but they didn't set out to hurt people, they just didn't consider that if you shoot at the side of a truck (a supposedly destructive but not dangerous act) it might have dire consequences if you MISS. (After all, how many of us miss all that often using the sniper rifle in GTA?) So, bad decision on their part.
People are incensed that TakeTwo and Sony are sued. It is descried as evidence of the out of control courts. However, what conservatives never seem to point out is that almost all of these suits are dismissed early on (and if you dig into the ones that aren't, like the infamous McDonald's coffee case, you find the facts aren't as cut-and-dried as you think). In other words, the courts aren't out of control; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do: adjudicate the rights of parties who feel they have been wronged.
One last (semi-random) point. Someone raised a first amendment issue below. That isn't really relevant here. Whether TakeTwo has a right to publish GTAIII is different from whether they can be held responsible for consequences that naturally flow from their decision to do so. (I'm not saying that shooting at trucks is a natur