Victory in Victorville

GPS World,  Dec, 2007  

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At the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Urban Challenge, held November 3 in Victorville, California, Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing "Boss" turned in the best overall performance and won the $2 million first prize. Stanford University Racing's "Junior" won $1 million for second place (mere seconds behind), while Virginia Tech "Odin" took home $500,000 for third.

All eleven driverless vehicle finalists obeyed California traffic laws, to varying degrees, while traversing 60 miles of urban roadways. The vehicles started from a known point and returned there three times for new assignments, all within a six-hour time span. Each vehicle had to make complete stops at stop signs, obey posted speed limits, and find a designated parking spot among hundreds of spaces and park there. The vehicles had to navigate to several designated locations while successfully avoiding obstacles, people, and other vehicles.

The winning Boss, a Chevy Tahoe, carried more than a dozen lasers, cameras, and radars to view the world, and more than 500,000 lines of code to to tie them together. Boss uses perception, planning, and behavioral software to reason about traffic and take appropriate actions while proceeding safely to a destination. Needless to say, GPS performs a central function; the Tartan team lists Applanix and TeleAtlas among its sponsors.

Stanford, last year's first-place finisher in the 132-mile Mojave Desert Grand Challenge, also named Applanix as a sponsor. Virginia Tech lists a NovAtel GPS/INS on its website. Autonomous vehicles entered by teams from the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and MIT also finished the race, though Cornell and MIT both exceeded the six-hour time limit set by DARPA.

Boss averaged about 14 miles an hour over the course.

This year's Challenge found corporate sponsors much more in evidence. Though never purely a university versus university contest, and never intended to be so, this year's race made clear that corporate had come to play and test its designs. While DARPA's aim is definitely military--autonomous driving will save lives on the battlefield by removing soldiers from supply convoys and other vehicles in harm's way--the sponsors, particularly General Motors, discussed how this technology might initially be most useful in vehicles driven by teenagers who had not yet developed the skills required to make them "safe" on roadways, as well as the elderly who, for whatever reason, may have lost some of those skills or physical abilities over the years.

Of course, the heart of each system providing the precision and the navigation inputs beats with GPS. "Several of the young engineering students told me," writes Don Jewell, the magazine's military and government editor, "that the GPS modules in their vehicles were the cheapest and most ubiquitous sensors they had incorporated into their sensor suites. While that's certainly understandable, it does not make GPS any less essential. You can integrate all the sophisticated sensors and computers you desire into your vehicle, such as lasers, LiDAR, radar, and high-definition cameras, but if it doesn't know exactly where it is at all times, then the other sensors simply don't matter.

"For me," Jewell continues "the most important outcome from the event is, there is no going back. I think those of us who were fortunate enough to be there in person will look back on the Urban Challenge as an event that has great historical significance, because it is the day totally autonomous vehicles first roamed the Earth and interacted with one another. This is a feat never before accomplished, and it will forever change the way we look at automobiles, and all other vehicles for that matter."

For hour-by-hour race reporting, see Jewell's coverage at www.gpsworld.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Questex Media Group, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning