DoD Robocar Race To the Rescue

Imagine a world where a human soldier no longer has to risk his or her life doing things like driving a supply convoy in a combat zone, or leading a scouting mission in enemy territory driving a HUMVEE. That's the goal of the DARPA Urban Challenge, the latest in a series of competitions sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency based in Arlington. Both the semi-finals, and finals of the competition take place in late October and early November.

Here's a look at three of the 36 entries in the competition:

GERMAN ENTRY, AMERICAN HONCHO

Richard Bishop of Westminster, Maryland, says his involvement in Team Lux's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge is a natural extension of his work on intelligent systems to help the driver stay out of trouble:

I am a consultant in the intelligent vehicle space worldwide. I'm focused on tracking trends in what are called "active safety systems", for example, the radars that can detect an impending collision, trigger the vehicle to hit the brakes, and avoid the collision. Another example is lane departure warning, which is a video camera and a detection system that gives the driver a warning if they begin to leave their lane.

Bishop says his involvement with Team Lux is primarily sponsored by IBEO, the company that makes one of the electronic sensors on his team's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge. And he says the car itself is very much like those you see driving on any street:

It's a 2006 Volkswagen Passat (station wagon), and other than the fancy paint job we put on it, it looks like a normal vehicle. The technical team has integrated three laser scanners, and then all the electronics are integrated in the back of the vehicle, where the spare tire would normally be.

He adds that one goal is to convince the public and the auto industry that you don't have to have a car loaded with "funny looking gizmos" to take advantage of active safety systems.

Bishop says the team's VW Passat, which has been nicknamed "the Lynx", is designed to be rolled up to the starting line, where the team will simply push a button, and the car is expected to begin going through its paces, with the help of four powerful PCs set up as computer servers.

"Its scanning the world around it constantly, more than once per millisecond. Laser pulses are sent out, and they reflect off of whatever happens to be out there." The computers, he says, create a picture of the laser reflections, plus the range (distance) of whatever is out there. Bishop adds that the computers also plot the relative position of Lynx, and then generally determines what to do next.

Bishop says the Lynx has been in development since last September, when four German engineers began work on the vehicle in Hamburg, Germany.

Keeping in mind that DARPA projects that start out with a military application eventually find their way to civilian life, Bishop was asked to reflect on the possible real world applications for the technology behind a fully robotic vehicle:

I believe the DARPA work will get us to the next generation, even smarter systems that will allow drivers to deal with even more unusual circumstances. And, systems that more actively control the vehicle, and hitting the breaks to avoid crashes.

Richard Bishop believes that with the technology arising from DARPA Urban Challengers like Team LUX, the world may be about ten years away from cars and trucks that can safely drive themselves.

A SCION WITH A MIND OF ITS OWN

Meet Tommy-Two, the brain-child of Paul Perrone, the owner of Perrone Robotics in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the team leader of Team Jefferson.

"Its actually a stock Scion XB car. We bought it used a year ago for about $10,000 in Maryland. We drop in the actuators, the hardware, and the software, and anything else to make it autonomous."

Tommy-Two, or Tommy Junior as the Scion with a mind of its own is also known, will be one of 36 semifinal entries competing in the DARPA Urban Challenge. But on this day, he's parked in a garage in the basement of Perrone's home, that serves as the garage and lab for Tommy. Perrone says it all started with a phone call three years ago:

"A friend of mind from DARPA had told me about this race, and he knew at the time I'd started a robotics company, a software company, and thought it might be of interest to me, and sure enough it was."

Perrone says soon after, he moved to Charlottesville, where he founded his company, and began preparations for their first entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition for robotic vehicles operating in a desert environment.

This latest incarnation of Tommy -- named, by the way, in honor of President Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, and prolific inventor and scholar in his own right -- is the second car to have the name. Appropriately, some students and professors from UVA's engineering school are part of the Team Jefferson .

I asked Paul Perrone to explain what Team Jefferson had to do to the Scion to allow it to essentially drive itself:

Inside, there are actuators or motors that turn the steering wheel, pull the brake pedal, accelerate the throttle, shift the gearbox and what have you. On the outside of the car, we have a roof rack with sensors for our GPS to get our location, inertial navigation antennas that give us the heading, roll and pitch of the vehicle, and then we have a number of laser sensor radar units that tell us where obstacles are.

Students who stop to watch Tommy go through its paces in the parking lot of the John Paul Jones Arena on the University of Virginia campus would likely hear an electronic rendition of "It's a Small World After All" coming from a speaker on the seemingly driverless car. Perrone says that's the e-stop indicator...an audio warning, required by the DARPA challenge rules to tell anyone they're watching a robotic car. He explains that in competition, the vehicle will have a more generic electronic beep and siren to fulfill the DARPA requirement.

The goal, says Perrone, is to make Tommy navigate through the streets much as a human being would. David Drewsparski helps write Tommy's software allowing it to do this.

"We need to parallel park, we need to stop and go at stop signs, we need to find out who has precedence at an intersection, we need to turn on the blinkers whenever we're turning."

Paul Perrone says that while some other teams are spending as much as one to two million dollars to develop their entries, Tommy is unique because the price tag for the modified Scion will be closer to 150 thousand dollars - all tied, he says, to the goal of affordable robotic vehicles for the military.

Are we going to be able to afford to deploy one of these, or two of these, or hundreds of these, so that's part of the idea behind our vehicle here, building it for one-hundredth of the cost, and one-hundredth the amount of time as some of our competitors.

AIMING FOR A ROBOTIC FUTURE, REMEMBERING A TRAGIC PAST

One of the local teams participating in the DARPA Urban Challenge late next month comes from a community several hours southwest of Washington. Team "Victor Tango" takes its name from Virginia Tech, the school in rural Blacksburg, Virginia better known for football, but also for the engineering prowess of its students.

"Essentially, we'll pull up to the start line, we'll load a mission in, and we hit go."

Patrick Currier, a grad student in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, says that, in essence, is how Team Victor Tango's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge is supposed to work.

However, if you saw it, you might be hard pressed to single it out from most vehicles you see on the street:

We used a 2005 Ford Escape hybrid. One of our goals was to keep it as normal looking as possible. Inside you can hardly tell we've done anything. Outside, we do have a roof rack on top, it holds a couple of laser sensors, and cameras and a few antennas. We also have some lower-mounted laser range finders that stick out near the fenders and at the front and back of the car.

The robotic Ford Escape, which carries the nickname of "Odin", is the result of a partnership between Virginia Tech and Torc Technologies, a robotics firm based in Blacksburg. Currier says that in designing the software that allows the car to navigate itself through the course set up for the DARPA challenge, he had to help it to think like a human driver:

Generally, if you're driving down a road, the thing you're thinking about is driving down a lane, so we have a "drive in the lane" behavior. If another car is in front of you, you think you have to pass it, so that's what Odin thinks: "I have to activate my passing behavior."

So we have this big series of behaviors, and we have a way of putting them all together so we have a car that can navigate itself through a city.

Currier says that in an area in the back of the car, where most people pack their groceries, Team Victor Tango instead has packed the brains of Odin.

"We have two HP (Hewlett-Packard) servers, each has a quad-core processor with about four gigabytes of RAM, so we'll have the computing power of a half-dozen to a dozen standard personal computers."

The teams will have no contact with their cars during the competition, and only after the Escape has completed its run will they have access to computer sensor logs to determine how well their vehicle has performed. During the race, DARPA has access to an "emergency stop" button to bring the vehicle to a halt if things go wrong. As Odin completes one mission, the team will re-load its memory, and send it out on new missions until the six hour time period runs out.

Currier says along with carrying the hopes his team has for winning the two million dollar grand prize, it will also carry the memory of a tragic event on the Virginia Tech campus last Spring. He says that most members of the team know someone who was killed or injured when a gunman began attacking students and faculty on campus before turning the gun on himself. Currier says that it took DARPA "five minutes" to grant the team's request that Odin carry the number "32", in honor of those killed on the Virginia Tech campus.

Patrick Currier hopes that Odin, the Ford Escape hybrid that is Team Victor Tango's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge, will be one of the finalists in early November in the race to develop a fully robotic vehicle.

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On the Web:
FederalNewsRadio - Baby You CAN'T Drive My Car
DARPA - Urban Challenge
Team Lux (Germany) - homepage
Team Jefferson (Charlottesville) - homepage
Team Victor Tango (Virginia Tech) - homepage

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