Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, [1] earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.
Led by Associate Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the Stanford Racing Team was developed solely for the purpose of competing in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Stanford did not participate in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge and was considered to have 20:1 chances of winning the 2005 competition. [2] The car is currently located at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It was displayed at the 2006 New York International Auto Show and two years at the Volkswagen Autostadt Museum (Germany). The Stanford Racing Team entered a new vehicle, a modified Volkswagen Touareg wagon, dubbed "Junior", in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. [3] Other key contributors on the team include Michael Montemerlo (software lead), Sven Strohband (lead hardware engineer), David Stavens (roboticist/engineer), Hendrik Dahlkamp (computer vision lead), Cedric Dupont (vehicle lead), and Pamela Mahoney (communications lead). [4]
The car began as a standard European diesel model Volkswagen Touareg provided by Volkswagen's ERL for the competition. The Stanford Racing Team chose the Touareg for its "drive by wire" control system which could be adapted (and was done so by the ERL) to be run directly from an onboard computer without the use of actuators or servo motors; however, the steering wheel was driven by an electric motor and the gear shifting accomplished with a hydraulic piston). [5]
For navigation, the car was equipped with five roof-mounted Sick AG LIDAR units to build a 3-D map of the environment, thus supplementing the position sensing GPS system. An internal guidance system utilizing gyroscopes and accelerometers monitored the orientation of the vehicle and also served to supplement GPS and other sensor data. Additional guidance data was provided by a video camera used to observe driving conditions out to eighty meters (beyond the range of the LIDAR) and to ensure room enough for acceleration. Stanley also had sensors installed in a wheel well to record a pattern imprinted on the tire and to act as an odometer in case of loss of signal (such as when driving through a tunnel). Using the data from this sensor, the onboard computer can extrapolate how far it has traveled since the signal was lost. [6]
To process the sensor data and execute decisions, the car was equipped with six low-power 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M based computers in the trunk, running different versions of the Linux operating system.
The School of Engineering developed the 100,000 lines of software run the car as well as to interpret sensor data and execute navigation decisions. Using what Popular Mechanics described a "common robot hierarchy", the vehicle utilizes "low-level modules fed raw data from LIDAR, the camera, GPS sets, and inertial sensors into software programs [to control] speed, direction, and decision making. [5]
The vehicle featured a machine learning based approach to obstacle detection. Data from the LIDARs was fused with images from the vision system to perform a distant look-ahead. If a path of drivable terrain could not be detected for at least 40 meters in front of the vehicle, speed was decreased and the LIDARs were used to locate a safe passage.
To correct common errors made by the vehicle early in its development, the Stanford Racing Team created a log of "human reactions and decisions" and fed the data into a learning algorithm tied to the vehicle's controls; this action served to reduce errors. The computer log of humans driving also made the car more accurate in detecting shadows, a problem that had caused many of the vehicle failures in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. [5]
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA's mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and military use. The initial DARPA Grand Challenge was created to spur the development of technologies needed to create the first fully autonomous ground vehicles capable of completing a substantial off-road course within a limited time. The third event, the DARPA Urban Challenge extended the initial Challenge to autonomous operation in a mock urban environment. The most recent Challenge, the 2012 DARPA Robotics Challenge, focused on autonomous emergency-maintenance robots.
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chicken-and-egg problem there are several algorithms known for solving it, at least approximately, in tractable time for certain environments. Popular approximate solution methods include the particle filter, extended Kalman filter, covariance intersection, and GraphSLAM. SLAM algorithms are based on concepts in computational geometry and computer vision, and are used in robot navigation, robotic mapping and odometry for virtual reality or augmented reality.
Sandstorm is an autonomous vehicle created by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, for the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge competition. It is a heavily modified 1986 M998 HMMWV.
Kat-5 is an autonomous vehicle created by Team Gray, an organization comprising employees from The Gray Insurance Company and students from Tulane University's School of Engineering, for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Sebastian Thrun is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, and before that at Carnegie Mellon University. At Google, he founded Google X and Google's self-driving car team. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and at Georgia Tech.
Red Whittaker is a roboticist and research professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. He led Tartan Racing to its first-place victory in the DARPA Grand Challenge (2007) Urban Challenge and brought Carnegie Mellon University the two million dollar prize. Previously, Whittaker also competed for the DARPA Grand Challenge placing second and third place simultaneously, in the Grand Challenge Races.
TerraMax is the trademark for autonomous/unmanned ground vehicle technology developed by Oshkosh Defense. Primary military uses for the technology are seen as reconnaissance missions and freight transport in high-risk areas so freeing soldiers from possible attacks, ambushes or the threat of mines and IEDs. The technology could also be used in civilian settings, such as autonomous snow clearing at airports.
H1ghlander is an autonomous vehicle. Created by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team, it is a heavily modified 1999 HUMMER H1. It competed in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.
The second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was a 212 km (132 mi) off-road course that began at 6:40 am on October 8, 2005, near the California/Nevada state line. All but one of the 23 finalists in the 2005 race surpassed the 11.78 km (7.32 mi) distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race. Five vehicles successfully completed the course:
The third driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge was commonly known as the DARPA Urban Challenge. It took place on November 3, 2007 at the site of the now-closed George Air Force Base, in Victorville, California, in the West of the United States. Discovery's Science channel followed a few of the teams and covered the Urban Challenge in its Robocars series.
The Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (VWERL) is a division of the Volkswagen Group of America, Inc., with its headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Velodyne Lidar is a Silicon Valley-based lidar technology company, headquartered in San Jose, California. It was spun off from Velodyne Acoustics in 2016. As of July 2020, the company has had about 300 customers. Velodyne Lidar ships sensors to mobility industry customers for testing and commercial use in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, mapping, robotics, infrastructure and smart city applications.
CajunBot refers to the autonomous ground vehicles developed by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for the DARPA Grand Challenges. CajunBot was featured on CNN and on the Discovery Channel science series Robocars.
The Learning Applied to Ground Vehicles (LAGR) program, which ran from 2004 until 2008, had the goal of accelerating progress in autonomous, perception-based, off-road navigation in robotic unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). LAGR was funded by DARPA, a research agency of the United States Department of Defense.
MadeInGermany was a driverless car developed by the Freie Universität Berlin and AutoNOMOS Labs in 2011.
Gary Bradski is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Industrial Perception, a company that developed perception applications for industrial robotic application and has worked on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as published a book on that library.
Adrian Kaehler is an American scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and author. He is best known for his work on the OpenCV Computer Vision library, as well as two books on that library.
Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.
Chris Urmson is a Canadian engineer, academic, and entrepreneur known for his work on self-driving car technology. He is the co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company founded in 2017 to develop self-driving technology. Urmson was instrumental in pioneering and advancing the development of self-driving vehicles since the early 2000s.
David Stavens is an American entrepreneur, scientist and co-founder and CEO of Nines, a Silicon Valley teleradiology practice. He was co-founder and CEO of Udacity and a co-creator of Stanley, the winning car of the second driverless car competition of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Stavens has published in the fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
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