KludgeHack

DARPA Urban Challenge 2007

For those who don’t know the DARPA Challenge, I must say, you are loosing one of the biggest event of the year. The challenge is a prize competition for driverless cars, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research organization of the United States Department of Defense.

Every year university’s from all around the world build their powerful autonomous vehicle. The last two years, the challenge was to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. Now, this year challenge is scheduled to take place November 3, further advances vehicle requirements to include autonomous operation in a mock urban environment.

You can find Stanford video from last year here. The video is a talk about, how they won the challenge, both funny and technical. You can also find more info in the Wikipedia, where you can also find links to the official pages of the teams playing.

Demonstrating how fantastic this challenge can be, recently the the Stanford University car, Junior, just got it’s learning permit for basic driving.  What does “basic driving” entail?  Navigating a 4 way intersection with live traffic, passing a stationary car and doing a U-turn.

So it is a car that can do what a 16 year old can do but why is this such a big deal?  Well, think about all the rules you have to follow while driving.  Proper distance, checking if you can change lanes, using turn signals, and actually following the speed limit are just a few.  But in real life, you break each and every one of those rules.  So designing a system that respects those rules then is allowed to break them when it best suits the system’s needs is tricky.

If you saw the Stanford video (above) you will appreciate the advantages of a driverless car.