urban 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.

The folks over at Technology Review are giving a glimpse of what to expect in 2007: a far more challenging grand challenge dubbed the Urban Challenge, novel nanotube artificial muscles, more domestic robots and interestingly predict Microsoft's push into robotics software. They seem to be basing this on the fact that Ballmer and Co. just released a developer's kit for simple robots. However, Microsoft has in the past started projects with so much zeal only to let them subsequently die slow, painful deaths (remember Smart Personal Objects Technology, Tablet PC's and more recently UMPC's and PlaysForSure?). We can only wait to see if MSFT does things right with the robotics software but the outlook doesn't look as bright to me.

Related :
Stanford Urban Challenge Team
HAL at University of Tsukuba
Biomechatroncs Group at MIT
Technorati Profile ... continued