Victor Tango Also competing for Urban Challenge gold is Virginia Tech and its Victor Tango racing team. The school's robotic vehicle, named Odin, is based on a hybrid Ford Escape (one of two donated by the automaker). The rolling robot incorporates several urban-oriented autonomous vehicle technologies, including traffic behavior modeling, route planning, autonomous parking, road detection, and vehicle passing. Like Stanford's Junior, Odin uses a variety of sensor technologies, including computer vision, laser range-finders, differential GPS, and inertial measurement navigation.
Alfred Wicks, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the school, believes that a combination of computer vision and laser range-finding is crucial for spotting and avoiding obstacles. "The vision system works like peoples' eyes. It collects data and it's processed," he says. "To supplement that vision system, the laser range-finders give range and angles." The overall system helps Odin's computer distinguish between moving cars and static objects.
Wicks believes that events like the Urban Challenge give engineering students a taste of the excitement and recognition usually reserved for athletes. "Students get to go out and compete, not chasing a little piece of pigskin around the football field, but competing in technology," he says. DARPA has given Victor Tango the number 32 to honor the people who lost their lives in last spring's campus shooting tragedy.
Road Tests Testing a robotic vehicle is nothing like taking a dealership's car out for a spin around the block. "A lot of the behaviors are hard to test," says Wicks. "You don't send a vehicle out into the streets of Blacksburg autonomously, obviously, for liability reasons and common sense."
Real-world testing barriers inspired the Virginia Tech team to build its own autonomous vehicle driving simulator. "It's a first class simulator that allows us to take the software and see how it behaves, not only with the sensors that we've modeled but also with other software," says Wicks.
Still, while simulation is useful, nothing beats real-world testing. Competing in the Urban Challenge will require researchers to work in remote, inhospitable locations for long periods. For a non-urban DARPA competition held in 2005, Montemerlo and his team lived in the desert, full time, for two-and-a-half months. "Day after day you would go out, drive the vehicle, and discover some problems," he says. "In the evening you would fix the source code and then go back the next day and do it again."
Wicks feels that readying a vehicle for a DARPA competition is a lot like preparing for any major race. "Like any competitive team, you have to practice and you have to learn to get everything to work together," he says.
Finish Line The Urban Challenge is more a test of functionality than of speed. A vehicle that runs the course fastest won't win the competition if it consistently fails the autonomous driving tasks. And while the top teams will bask in glory, the Urban Challenge's ultimate winner will be the military, which will be able to cherry-pick the best autonomous technologies. Whitaker expects the military to quickly roll out a multitude of autonomous vehicles. "In the short run, you'll see autonomous snowplows on airstrips and vehicles in controlled environments, like in ports or on military bases, being able to operate autonomously," he says.
Commercial automakers also stand to benefit from the Urban Challenge, since they're sponsoring technologies such as automated parking and collision avoidance that will be incorporated into their product lines. In fact, the Urban Challenge provides a nearly ideal test bed for cutting-edge vehicle operability designs, says Varsha Sadekar, group manager of the active safety and driver assistance team at the General Motors Research and Development Center. GM sponsors Carnegie Mellon's Urban Challenge entry, a robotized 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe.
Meet The Boss Carnegie Mellon University's DARPA Urban Challenge entry, "Boss," scrambles across the dusty, hardscrabble landscape at the General Motors Desert Proving Grounds in Mesa, Ariz. The driverless SUV, one of two contributed to the school's project by GM, carries a full load of autonomous driving technologies, including automated throttle, braking, and steering control functions.
"It's also been equipped with a lot of different sensors," says Varsha Sadekar, group manager of the active safety and driver assistance team at the General Motors Research and Development Center in Warren, Mich. "Radar and lidar can look at the short range as well as the long range," she notes. "Plus we have cameras on the vehicle and, of course, we have GPS for positioning." A central computer, supplied by Intel, runs planning software that continuously tells Boss where and how to drive, how to stay out of trouble, and how to most efficiently reach a destination.
Sadekar says it's important for automakers to invest in the future. "Autonomous vehicles clearly will not happen overnight, but it gives us a nice thing to aim for," she says. "In the meantime, we get experience on developing the features that we will be able to give to our customers as we move toward that big goal: the self-driving car or truck."
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