grand challenge

You know how you had to watch The Matrix I again just before Reloaded came out to psych and prepare yourself for an awesome sequel? Well, with the Urban Challenge - aka Grand Challenge II - right around the corner, we wanted to relive the moments of the Grand Challenge and found this awesome video series on the historic robotics contest here on PBS NOVA. If you are not familiar with it, PBS NOVA is an award winning and incredibly brilliant television series covering science and technology and it's broadcast in freely available media (public television and the Internet). Each of their one-hour television episodes has a dedicated web space like this one on the Grand Challenge. I watched the Grand Challenge episode for the first time online and it was great! They have mesmerizing aerial video of Stanley and Highlander racing through ... continued

A few days ago, DARPA announced the semi-finalists of this year's urban challenge after having wrapped up the site visits. We gave you a preview of MIT's car a few weeks ago. The 36 semi-finalists include teams like Stanford's Junior, Team MIT and CMU's Tartan Racing. A few German teams have also made it to the semi-finals.

The next stage called the National Qualification Event is scheduled for October 26-31 and will be held in Victorville, CA. Count on waziwazi.com to be there and bring you all the highlights!

Here's a video of the MIT Urban Challenge car in action!

DARPA are continuing their site visits to narrow down the contestants for the much anticipated Urban Challenge. Last week, they visited MIT. Ford, which formed a research alliance with MIT, provided the team with a brand spankin' new Land Rover LR3 to play with. The team's got some heavyweight research support, drawing together the expertise of MIT and Olin College faculty, students and Draper Labs.

Can you hear the servos of robots everywhere zipping around in excitement? Urban Challenge is nearing! DARPA has begun making site visits to decide what teams will make the semi-finals of the much anticipated robot competition. During these site-visits, the robot cars will be put through a test course with a four-way intersection and moving traffic. DARPA will wrap up the visits around July 20 and announce, on August 10, the 30 semi-finalists and location for the big event.

Stanford's Junior seemed to have passed the test last Thursday. Junior has 8 LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems for distance measurement and path detection. Junior's positioning system is accurate to about 30cm.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that ended on February 19th 2007, Sebastian Thrun, the father of “Stanley” made a bold prediction that autonomous highway driving will be possible within a decade and cars will be smart enough to maneuver through city traffic in 25 years.

For autonomous driving, the artificial intelligence system has to be made sophisticated enough to recognize and understand objects before the vehicle should actuate. “Stanley”, the winner of the 2005 Grand Challenge Race, is equipped with laser range finders, radars, cameras and a monocular vision system. The robot sees a bi-colored 3D image and knows how its surrounding environment looks like.

Dr. Simon Lucas of the Department of Computer Science at University of Essex (United Kingdom) is doing autonomous driving research on model cars. Robotic cars navigating across the Mohave Desert by themselves surely attracts many media eyeballs and sponsors with fat wallets. “But by using model cars, we will be able to investigate the possibilities of the technology far easier and more cheaply.”--Dr. Lucas said.

An autonomous model car race will take place in the summer of 2007 on Colchester campus at University of Essex. waziwazi.com will be at this event to keep everyone posted. After this warm-up session, autonomous model cars built by researchers across the world will have a final rally at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in Hong Kong in 2008.

In the wake of winning the 2005 Grand Challenge, VW is trying to woo us again with Stanley's little sister--Herbie '53 plus 1' fully loaded, but this time without Hollywood.

The basic anatomy on Herbie is quite similar to that of Stanley's--radar and laser sensor (multi-plane scanner) for close range sensing and a satellite navigation system to define the travel route. I wonder if the ERL is playing any part in this project. ... continued