Grand Challenge Teams in the News

Posted 23 Feb 2004 at 02:12 UTC by steve

As the DARPA Grand Challenge approaches, articles about teams and their robots are begining to show up in lots of local papers. The Baton Rouge Advocate has an article on University of Louisiana at Lafayette's CajunBot. CajunBot also rated an article in the Lafayette Advertiser. You can read about the University of Florida's Team CIMAR Navigator in a recent newswise article. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covers the CMU Red Team's Sandstorm. And the San Francisco Chronicle recently covered the three teams from the Bay Area: Team Digital Auto Drive, Team Overbot, and the Blue Team.

Red team, posted 23 Feb 2004 at 03:18 UTC by while_true » (Observer)

I love the red team. I work right down the hall from Red‛TM]s office.

I couldn't join them when I started at CMU last June because I was already committed to an advisor, but their work is excellent.

A few thoughts:
-Using the most advanced perception, combined with extremely detailed maps and pre-planning is the most likely to succeed.
-The stabilization for the computation is amazing: the vehicle itself, a custom stabilization mount, internally stabilized racks, disks in suspension, and robust disks for internal stabilization.
-Their plans to continue work after the race, regardless of the outcome, is respectable and exciting.
-Their win would greatly influence my chances for a good job :)

_ivan

I'm impressed, posted 23 Feb 2004 at 17:44 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

They all have great autonomous vehicles here. It ought to make for a great competition. I do say the Red Team's use of what looks like a modified Hummer is pretty cool. Must be nice to have a "sugar daddy" with lots of deep pockets. :)

Red team probably has it right, posted 25 Feb 2004 at 06:08 UTC by Timster » (Master)

Red team also is tackling the problem from a bigger picture perspective (mapping, route planning)instead of just a react and navigation perspective (which they also are doing), but then they have the resources to do so. Which hopefully would be the case also in a live military action which I believe is DARPAs main usage scenario.