The first 11 teams for a race in which robot cars will jostle with real ones along mocked-up city streets have been announced. The teams must construct autonomous vehicles to navigate an unfamiliar urban environment in the shortest time possible. The robot racers will face a "simulated" urban course 96 kilometres (60 miles) in length in November 2007. The course will feature urban obstacles, such as trees and buildings, traffic signs and other moving vehicles. Its location is yet to be disclosed. The contestants must obey traffic regulationsso I guess this won't be in Boston?. As well as merging with other women talking on cell phones in their SUVs traffic, changing lanes and observing stop signs, the robo-participants will have to pull into a parking lot for a short period. The first three vehicles to complete the course in less than 6 hours will be awarded prizes.
The event is called the Urban Grand Challenge and organised by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is the follow-up its original Grand Challenge, a robotic race across a 212 km desert course, which was successfully completed in October 2005.
The teams that finished first and second in the desert challenge, from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon universities, are among those chosen to take part in the urban event. The Stanford team will enter a modified Volkswagen, while the team from Carnegie Mellon University has teamed up with General Motors and will enter a Chevrolet. A pre-production Camaro would be so cool "The Urban Challenge will develop a leap of capability beyond what is possible in today's human-driven cars," says William Whittaker, the team leader for Carnegie Mellon University.
The cars involved in the original Grand Challenge were fitted with various on-board sensors, including laser range-finders, radar units, stereo cameras and GPS receivers. They also carried several networked computers to process this sensor information and control the vehicle in response. Stanford's vehicle used a machine learning algorithms to mimic the behaviour of a human driver.
The other nine teams selected to participate come from academia and the automotive industry. They are from MIT, Caltech, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University, Raytheon I guess I gotta root for the home team, then, Honeywell Aerospace, Autonomous Solutions, Golem Group and Oshkosh Truck Corporation. "We received more than 60 proposals from across the US and the world, representing a broad array of backgrounds and technical approaches," I wonder how many they got from Islamic countries? says Norman Whitaker, DARPA's Urban Challenge programme manager.
Each of the 11 teams announced by DARPA will receive $1 million in funding from the agency. Later in October 2006, another set of teams will be announced, but this group will receive no funding from DARPA.
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