Stanford University

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.

Biomimetics: mimicing nature

Nature is awe-inspiring. There so much engineering knowledge to be gained from studying biological systems. Take this molecular biologist from UCSB: by studying how a sea sponge can create its intricate glass skeleton, he derived a method of creating thin film semiconductor materials under MUCH milder conditions than currently used. A team from Stanford created Stickybot. It's an amazing gecko-inspired robot that can climb smooth vertical surfaces. It's motion is quite amazing and life-like. No, it does not use suction cups or the venturi effect. It uses directional adhesives on it's toes - something like unidirectional velcro. Be amazed by videos of the bot in action here and here .