DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 164
fishdan wrote to mention that the Darpa Grand Challenge is getting underway again. The qualifying rounds started yesterday. National media has picked up on the story, with pieces at the Washington Post and Seattle Times. From the Post: "The autonomous robotic vehicles began competing Wednesday in the first of a series of qualifying rounds at the California Speedway. Half will advance to the Oct. 8 starting line of the so-called Grand Challenge. The grueling, weeklong semifinals are designed to test the vehicles' ability to cover a roughly 2-mile stretch of the track without a human driver or remote control. Participants ranging from souped-up SUVs to military behemoths will be graded on how well they can self-drive on rough road, make sharp turns and avoid obstacles _ hay bales, trash cans, wrecked cars _ while relying on GPS navigation and sensors, radar, lasers and cameras that feed information to computers."
No Driver Required... (Score:5, Informative)
On a side note...I wish they'd let more diesel cars in the country. The chase car is another Touraeg but this one is a Canadian V10 TDI. It has something like 500 lb-ft of torque but gets about the same highway mileage as my small VW does.
Good luck contestants (Score:5, Informative)
This will be a MUCH more interesting contest if the teams do better than the last time around. (the best team only got 7 miles [imagiverse.org] out of 175 total.) Granted, even that is impressive given the circumstances.
I wish the best of luck to all of those competing.
Re:No Driver Required... (Score:3, Informative)
Video of MITRE entry (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mitre.org/tech/meteor/ [mitre.org]
I saw it a few months ago doing it's thing around the
parking lot. It will be interesting to see how they
do on a live course.
Website to Track Race (Score:5, Informative)
I know my money is on Austin Robot Technology. Vehicle "(Not Available)" sounds like it'll be a real winner. lol!
-robyn [gearlog.com]
Re:No Driver Required... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The amazing failures of AI? (Score:5, Informative)
The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what the human does with one eye, let alone two. Humans have that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.
The problems of autonomous ground vehicles are greater than that of planes because there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.
The tasks the DARPA GC vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult.
There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ [dprg.org] and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php [seattlerobotics.org] . There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.
Go Team ENSCO! (Score:1, Informative)
Good luck to my former co-workers who are working with Ensco on the project. From what I hear, they're loving being out there and having a great week!
Re:The amazing failures of AI? (Score:4, Informative)
In short, the classical AI part (most folks seem to use D* + reactive controls) is not where 90+% of the processing bandwidth is used, you need that power for sensing and for guaranteeing that your control loops cycle at at least some minimum frequency to guarantee safe operations.
That said, there's a lot the gov't can do to make this problem a lot easier to solve. Standard bus designs (like FireWire) which can power most of the sensors on the bus are a really great start. Open protocols from the wire up are also important. A push towards integrating more intelligence in the sensors (embedded FPGAs which allow you to do optional processing on the raw signals coming in) can help quite a bit. Research into high-speed busses that allow you to pretend you have a shared memory multiproc will also help a lot. Finding a way to reliably and efficiently move processing algorithms into FPGAs or microcontrollers will also help to distribute the workload and reduce overall bandwidth and processing requirements. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of fundamental algorithm work to be done before you get to that point, but as certain algorithms becomes standardized this will become a lot more feasible.
Re:The amazing failures of AI? (Score:2, Informative)
The AI systems are competing against 500 million years of evolutionary development. The computer systems being used are serial processors optimized for problems of a very different nature. Just trying to explicitely state the problems of what an autonomous vehicle is supposed to do in sufficient detail is daunting, let alone trying to solve those problems.
A human spends years as an infant trying to sort out how the world works, and decades after that puzzling out the details. And despite all the experience we have with out own thinking and observing others, we still don't know what intelligence is about or how it works.
Yes, it is a very hard problem
Tomshardware Qualification Day 1 Update (Score:2, Informative)
Cornell's Team (Score:2, Informative)
You can read their blog here [blogspot.com], or find their website (with technology writeups) here [cornell.edu].