DARPA’s Urban Challenge will take place this coming weekend (Nov. 3) when the finalists have six hours to go around a 60-mile course, in Victorville, California, performing a variety of tasks that are significantly more demanding than those required of vehicles during DARPA’s past robot races.
The finals of DARPA’s Urban Challenge reduced the competitors to eleven teams this week, after the original 35 competitors spent the past week running around the retired Air Force Base.
Out of 35 self-guided vehicles that qualified for the semifinals, only 11 teams qualified for DARPA’s 60-mile race. They were Stanford Racing Team, (which won the event in 2005); Ben Franklin Racing Team, from Philadelphia; MIT; Carnegie Mellon University’s Tartan Racing team; Team Cornell from Ithaca, N.Y.; Team Oshkosh Truck; and Honeywell/Intelligent Vehicle Systems.
European companies’ involvement fared quite well in the semi-finals, with Team AnnieWay and CarOLO through to the finals along with Team UCF and VictorTango.
The original plan was to have 20 teams in the final.
The reason fewer challengers reached the final stage than anticipted, said DARPA director Tony Tether, was that not all of the robo-cars were safe enough on the road. During the qualifying events, one competitor after another drove into trouble - some crashed, some made dangerous turns, and some flew off the course entirely.
Once each autonomous vehicles enters the course, it is solely under the control and guidance of its onboard mission computer.
The vehicles must merge into traffic, navigate four-way intersections, respond to blocked roads, pass on-coming cars on narrow roads, and keep up with traffic on two- and four-lane roads.
DARPA director Tony Tether (interview), outlined the basic rules for competing teams in a briefing last night, concluding with the most important rule of all: “Don’t hit anyone!!!”
Tomorrow’s first-place finisher will be awarded $2 million, with $1 million for second place and $500,000 for third. Tether likes to talk up the race as an effort to save lives on the battlefield, but creating killer robot tanks may be a less charitable, if more likely motivation.
Sensors on the vehicles act as eyes, although the real trick is software integration of all the sensor data.
- Lidar maps distance to obstacles with a laser, creating a 360 field composed of hundreds of thousands of dots. Sick has become the standard sensor for robotic navigation, although the Velodyne HDL-64E, a 3-D 360 degree lidar, is also used.
- Stereo cameras support the lidar during normal driving, creating a depth map and road edge detection. Stereo pairs can surround the car for 360 degree views.
- Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is an off-the-shelf, 77GHz radar that allows for easy detection of other cars driving ahead.
- Differential GPS, an enhancement to GPS, using a network of fixed ground based reference stations, provides accurate location to less than a foot.
Below is the world as seen from the eyes of Little Ben, a modified Prius from the University of Pennsylvania.
- Tartan
- Victor Tango
- Stanford
- Ben Franklin
- Team UCF
- MIT
- Team Cornell
- Team Oshkosh
- Team Honeywell
- Team AnnieWay
- CarOLO
C/Net has photos and The Register is blogging. Here are some other blogs (Google search) and videos from TG Daily, YouTube and Google Video. Jeffrey Tseng made a terrific A/V slideshow.
Robots will be released in order of pole position. To see the race unfold, visit www.grandchallenge.org for a live Webcast starting 7:30 a.m, Saturday morning.
UPDATE: Carnegie Mellon University won the grand prize of $2m for their first place entry (Team Tartan), while Stanford University took second, for $1m, and Virginia Tech came in third for a $500k prize.
In related autonomous news, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Fest 07, was held in Panama City, Fla., June 12. It was the largest in-water demonstration of unmanned underwater, surface, air and ground vehicles ever conducted (gallery) and was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and hosted by Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City.
The AUV Fest is held about every 18 months and started in 1997. Although most of the 80 or so vehicles at the AUV Fest were underwater drones, the event also featured air, surface, and ground systems. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego develops underwater robots as well as land and air robots.
Mobilisa received a two-year, $3.3 million contract by the U.S. Navy to develop the hardware and software for a prototype system for the Littoral Sensor Grid. “Essentially we are building a very large wireless ‘hot spot’ over the water,” said Dr. Nelson Ludlow, CEO of Mobilisa.
When the huge NEPTUNE Project, which is wiring up the West Coast, becomes operational in late 2008, scientists will be able to listen to migrating whales, study dwindling fish stocks, spot never-before-seen microbes, watch for processes leading to major earthquakes and warn about approaching tsunami as well as pilot autonomous underwater vehicles.
“This is a Nasa-scale mission“, says Professor John Delaney, “to basically enter the inner space, to be there perpetually.”
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