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The Volkswagen Touareg that was crowned as the
first DARPA Grand Challenge winner in 2005 (the first challenge was in 2004, but no winners were crowned) is making a grand tour that will eventually lead the fully autonomous vehicle to the top dog of museums, the Smithsonian. The Touareg was nicknamed "Stanley" since it's so much easier to pronounce.
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novelties
After proving unmanned ground vehicles could do things all on their own in the DARPA Grand Challenge and then following up with the Urban Challenge it was time to start talking the same language. SAE has standardized the communications protocols for umanned vehicles and has given it a sexy name to boot — Joint Architecture for Unmanned Vehicles or JAUS, see, sexy. Anyway, it's basically a method which allows one unmanned vehicle to talk to another about situational conditions, location, direction, payload, and other pertinent information
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The Toyota Grand Prix, slated for April 18 - 20, will feature more than
F1 ChampCar IRL The Tony George Racing League cars hauling ass around the track. As part of the Long Beach festivities, a Robotic Grand Prix will pit three of the biggest, most badass unmanned vehicles against each other. Junior, Boss and Ben are the three robo-racers that will tackle the 1.97-mile 11-turn circuit course. The three completely autonomous vehicles will have to complete one lap of the course and the fastest time will be awarded first place.
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darpa grand challenge
After criticizing MIT's bot for overtaking Cornell's car when it got confused by a barrier and causing a minor bumper brushing, it's come to my attention no points were deducted from either team. In fact, no teams were penalized for traffic infractions of any sort, and the final scoring came down to finish times. MIT managed to come in first place of the teams that didn't win spots on the podium, and that's pretty impressive for a squad conspicuously absent from previous races. MIT's bot, with its extensive array of sensors and custom-build hardware running around 100,000 lines of code written just for the event, was the most geek-tastic of the event. Even though they had 16 out of 40 cores running vision processing from their optical cameras, they still had a little trouble navigating the dirt road portion of the course. Unfortunately, apart from MIT's fourth place win, DARPA will not be providing final scores for the rest of the pack. Happy future defense contracting to all!
DARPA Grand Challenge Round-up
darpa grand challenge
After all points were tallied, Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing was the winner of this year's DARPA Grand Challenge. In second place was Stanford, with Virginia Tech in third. As podium finishers, the teams will receive $2 million, $1 million and $500,000, respectively. Currently, there are no plans for a fourth challenge, and murmurings from DARPA staff are that autonomous-vehicle development has reached a point such that it no longer needs seed money to flourish and evolve further. Hopefully they're wrong though, because the Grand Challenge a great event and tremendous motivation for public imagination. Maybe the teams will just bathe in Cristal tonight.
– Curtis Walker
darpa grand challenge
I'd been interested in Team LUX from the first time I saw their car in person. That's why I was really hoping to see them in the final race. Unlike some other teams, they stuck around for the finals after being disqualified a few days ago. Turns out they were eliminated because their car was unable to navigate on the dirt portion of the track. Without lane markers or any obvious edges to follow, the car simply didn't know what to do. They also had some technical issues. Their car died once during qualifying, but nobody knew whether it was a car problem, a computer glitch or the kill relay system. Also, in a very unlucky move, the car went kamikaze on DARPA's Dr. Tether's chase vehicle. While the Team-LUX members are confident a collision would not have happened — after all that's their specialty — the good ol' Doc was less optimistic and ordered the kill command be sent. No team knows their scores or the final nail in the coffin of their disqualification, so it's hard to say for sure, but in the end, the dirt road portion of the course would have killed 'em anyway.
– Curtis Walker
darpa grand challenge
Out here on the urban challenge course in Victorville, California, it's UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Tech and Cornell out of the original 11 left in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Of these, all said teams' autonomous vehicles have completed mission two as of 1:05 pm PT, with Cornell the final team to finish. All the cars are racing on the same course, but each has a unique mission plugged into it, meaning they have to interface with each other as well as a team professional drivers behind the wheel of several stunt Ford Tauruses. (More after the jump.)
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darpa grand challenge
Three-and-a-half million in prizes is a pretty big deal, and this year, the DARPA Grand Challenge will be webcast live on Saturday, Nov 3 starting at 6:00 am (PT). The event is free for anyone willing to brave a trip to Victorville, California, a Mojave desert town 81 miles northeast of Los Angeles. With 35 semifinalist teams competing, the easiest way to split them up is by whether they're primarily corporate or collegiate, which gets a little tough because there is a fair amount of crossover. What the corporate vehicles seem to have in common is an interest in actually being able to deliver their product to the end user, whereas the college teams seem more interested in trying things out that may not even be necessary. Installs seem to be pretty clean and sensor arrays are relatively modest. One team breaks away from this stereotype: Team Axion's car features gobs of hot glue, a PS3 to run the rear motion cameras, and windshield wipers for their cameras up front. They're also the only team to have brought the same vehicle back for each challenge. Insight Racing is another team with an interesting to look at vehicle: a Lotus with several MacMini's serving as its brain. It seems like only a few teams
really understand the value of a sexy platform in generating interest.
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darpa grand challenge
More than a year ago, DARPA awarded 11 teams $1 million each in seed money for vehicle R&D. Of the 60 applicants, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Autonomous Solutions, Virginia Polytechnic, CalTech, Cornell, The Golem Group, Honeywell, Raytheon and OshKosh were the only ones with proposals deemed worthy of the prize. So, what's a million dollars get ya these days? Anything from a mostly stock Toyota Highlander Hybrid to a gigantanormous robotic monster truck that belches Terminator sounds when in autonomous mode. Every team has a unique approach, and while similar hardware shows up on many of the vehicles, nobody seems to have the exact combination to match anyone else. Case in point. Last year's winner thinks it can get the job done without any optical cameras; Autonomous Solutions figures Windows XP is up to the task of commanding an SUV. Things are bound to get interesting on the A Track, and we're not even to the privately funded B Track entrants. [
DARPA Grand Challenge]
Jalopnik
