SciAutonics among Semi-Finalists in DARPA Grand Challenge!

As indicated earlier, DARPA announced on 9. August 2007 the 36 semi-finalists, which were selected after site visits to each of the teams. And, our team SciAutonics is among them!

Congratulations to the team, and best wishes for the remaining work!

I remember what a hard struggle this was in preparation for the first Grand Challenge in 2004...

Currently I am uploading photos about the DARPA Grand Challenge 2004 preparations from my large archive onto Flickr, placing them into a collection of several sets. The original RASCAL which is depicted in these pictures will no longer run; instead the team has now a more conventional vehicle, suitable for the anticipated urban scenario near Victorville.

Talk about Driverless Vehicles

This summer, Leeds Met has organised a lunch-time lecture series in Leeds city centre, where speakers from Leeds Met could give presentations about their work or an interesting topic. The audience were intended to be just people from the street, during their lunch break. I was asked to give such a talk, about "Automotive Futures: Driverless Vehicles".

The series had been going on since June and was relatively well visited. However, now in August most people are on vacation. So when I set up my laptop and was ready to talk, there were only 4 people in the audience - all of them from Leeds Met. Well, this was a bit disappointing, but I went ahead anyway and gave an overview on driverless vehicles, with a history of robotics and some of my own work in the PROMETHEUS program and in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge. The latter was actually quite relevant, as one day later there would be the announcement from DARPA about the Semi-finalists.

The talk took place in the Old Schoolboard in Leeds, 13:00-14:00. It might be repeated within the next few months, when people are back from vacation, and when the next DARPA Grand Challenge is in preparation on 3. November.

Another Visit in Vienna, November 2005

To celebrate the achievements in the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, the Austrian company ARC Seibersdorf hosted a "Special Event" at their location in the Tech Gate Vienna and invited me to give a talk there on the events that led to the participation of ARC Seibersdorf in our Team SciAutonics.

The DARPA Grand Challenge 2005

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition of autonomous ground vehicles. A prize of $2 Million was awarded to the team who would build a vehicle that could drive through a given route through the desert - without any driver or any remote control. The first Grand Challenge had taken place in March 2004, and on October 8 the 2nd comptetition was organized.

Our team SciAutonics, managed by team leader John Porter, participated in 2005 for the second time with the vehicle RASCAL. The team improved the performance of RASCAL by a factor of more than 20: instead of 0.75 miles in 2004, the vehicle this year drove a stunning distance of 16 miles.

The winner of this competition was the team from Stanford University, under the leadership of Prof. Sebastian Thrun. Congratulations to their remarkable achievement!

SciAutonics, LLC, as a company will continue to work in the autonomous vehicle market.