Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
road and to move in the right direction. Using the GPS
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satellite navi-
gation system with its digital road maps, a system that is fast becoming
popular in upmarket models, the car can follow a pre-determined route,
allowing Klaus to concentrate on the driving. And just in case Klaus ap-
pears to be making a mistake it can be overruled by a virtual co-driver,
thereby making the whole system almost totally reliable.
Klaus does not only get to test drive VW's cars on easy stretches of
road. On the toughest sections of the company's test track the cars and
their drivers have to put up with whole sections of cobbled road, large
puddles of water, and potholes the size of small craters. This might prove
good training for Klaus, if VW decide to enter the Grand Challenge
competition sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA). The challenge is to develop an autonomous vehicle
that can drive unaided from near Los Angeles to Las Vegas, a distance
of approximately 142 miles over rugged terrain in the Mojave Desert.
DARPA provide the contestants with a list of the GPS coordinates of
229,000 points on the route, in order to enable the vehicles to navigate
the course. The purpose of the contest, according to DARPA, is to en-
courage the development of technology that “will help save American
lives on the battlefield”. [3]
The 2004 Grand Challenge was contested by 15 teams, none of
which finished the course. In fact the farthest that any of the vehicles
got was the 7.4 miles achieved by a team from Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity, whose project was funded with a $5 million budget. Only five of
the other entries made it past the one-mile post, the second best getting
stuck on an embankment, one being stopped by a hill, and the others
suffering various mishaps including hitting a wall in the starting area.
Despite this lack of success by all of the contestants in 2004, or per-
haps because of it, DARPA promptly doubled the prize for the first vehi-
cle to succeed at the challenge, to $2 million for the 2005 competition,
and by October 2004 almost 80 applications had been received for the
20 available places in the following year's contest. If this level of enthu-
siasm is sustained, I predict that the Grand Challenge prize will be won
before 2015.
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Global Positioning System—a collection of satellites that circle the earth and are used as refer-
ence points, providing an accuracy within a few feet when identifying the location of a particular
GPS receiver on the earth's surface.
