By DAVID TEMPLETON
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Driving city miles can be dangerous and cause hypertension. But that challenge increases greatly when the moving vehicle no longer has a human driver.
In the case of Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing team, the driver is a bank of computers with new-age software, radar devices, sensors, lasers, cameras and global positioning systems, along with various other high-tech doohickeys, gizmos and gadgets.
And the big question is, will it wend its way through the cityscape and return? If so, will it leave a wake of traffic violations and downed utility poles? Will its computers need air bags?
Those are the issues facing the Tartan Racing team, which is busy turning a Chevrolet Tahoe into a robomobile that can compete in next November's Urban Challenge.
The event, which the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency will hold at a Western site to be announced, will require robotic vehicles to navigate 60 mock city miles through traffic to carry out missions without human interaction.
DARPA competitions entice research teams to push wheeled technology to new heights.
Previous challenges offered a top prize of $2 million, but Congress did not fund the award for next year's competition. For now, DARPA can offer only trophies. But Carnegie Mellon participants said the lack of a cash prize hadn't lessened competitive fires.
In the March 2004 Grand Challenge, none of 15 vehicles finished a 142-mile desert course, but Carnegie Mellon's went farthest. In last year's Grand Challenge, Stanford University edged out the Carnegie Mellon team by 11 minutes in a 131-mile race through the Mojave Desert. Another Carnegie Mellon entry finished third.
But deserts are static environments, save for the occasional tortoise or hare.
A city environment requires much smarter vehicles that observe speed limits and traffic signs. They must travel on the right side of double yellow lines, observe traffic lights and stay clear of city traffic and other obstacles.
"It's a whole other layer of complexity," said Chris Urmson, Tartan Racing's director of technology. "People are working on perception problems with city speeds and urban driving conditions. Not a lot of work has been done in operating in those spaces."
Tartan Racing Director Charles "Red" Whittaker said technology that regulates speed, braking and steering was well understood. But new technology is needed to make the vehicle follow traffic signs and codes. If a competitor's dead vehicle is blocking the road, the car must know when to break the law and cross the double lines to continue its mission.
Tartan Racing received the Chevy Tahoe from its prime sponsor, General Motors, and continues working on the car inside a garage at Carnegie Mellon's Robot City.
Tartan Racing has 12 researchers working full time or close to it on the project, with 12 other participating researchers. A tight timetable leaves little time to solve all the technological puzzles.
Urmson said the Carnegie Mellon vehicle, yet to be named, had traveled 100 miles, including 50 "blind" miles, in Robot City without human assistance. "We have the vehicle mostly together," he said. "We're happy with the progress so far."
Whittaker said many challenges remained in providing the car a means of negotiating the urban maze.
"Nothing less than full commitment will succeed," he said, describing his group as a dream team. "We're involved in it because it matters to the future of robotics, it matters to each of us individually and we're in it for the win. The reality is, it's a fantastic team to work with."
That team is busy making the car do things that were impossible in previous competitions.
In time, the technological leaps will help elderly or disabled drivers and, eventually, all motorists drive more easily and safely. The ultimate vision is a vehicle that does most, if not all, of the driving, removing human whimsy, distraction and road rage from the process.
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