DARPA, PS3 and Road Vehicles.

[SPM]

What does Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, road vehicles and PS3 have in common?

Answer - a Linux-Powered Driverless Vehicle

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/H...a-Linux-Powered-Driverless-Vehicle-60140.html

 

[SPM]

Another link with some videos.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7078245.stm

 

[patsu]

Thanks for posting this. I am a sucker at this sort of things.

So when can we see live demoes in international car shows ? Or a Forest Gump event where the autonomous vehicle travel from East Coast to West Coast ? Still 8 years (That would be still this gen)

 

[aaaaa00]

And in an amusing bit of irony:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34581/113/

Video: Axion Racing’s bot collides into chase car at Urban Challenge
Trendwatch
By Humphrey Cheung
Sunday, October 28, 2007 13:56
Recommend article:
Victorville (CA) – So far the crashes at the DARPA Urban Challenge have been restricted between robots and concrete, but today we saw Axion Racing’s vehicle “Spirit” collide with a human-driven chase car. Fortunately the driver was unhurt, but the Ford Taurus he was driving wasn’t so lucky. The car now has a long gash and decent sized dent in the back-right quarter panel.

World's first robot-human car accident, powered by PS3.

 

[patsu]

That's cool though. Many autonomous cars simply ram into a wall (like the automated truck the other day). Too bad the human driver couldn't speed up to avoid the accident this time.

From the comments...

I actually got to see this live. The article states that the car could have sped up but, regardless of whether that was even possible, that wouldn't have necessarily prevented the accident. The DARPA traffic vehicle should have swerved like they had for previous bots. However, in this instance there was another vehicle coming in the opposite direction (the red car, like Lan points out) so there was no room to swerve.

For anyone who hasn't driven a Taurus, to accelerate from 10 mph to any mph takes a very long time. My foot was on the floor and the car barely speed up, I may have been going a maximum of 14 mph at the point of impact.

They should hold more frequent contests. Once the team and navigation system gathers enough experiences and data, they will be able to fine tune their algorithm more.

The Axiom team is supposed to replace all their Dells with PS3s (instead of just 1). Not sure if this has been done. Would be great to see a fully PS3 powered car. Go go go !

 

[SPM]

This clip has an interesting robot eye view of the route planning and obstacle avoidance thought process for the MIT robot driver.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wV6bk7L4400&feature=related