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Team #09 Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team
Team #09 on my list is Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team and as you might guess they are from Berkeley, CA.
"The Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team is made up of researchers from UC Berkeley and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. The team represents a unique collaboration between two very strong groups in the area of field robotics and control. From UC Berkeley this includes real-time avionics experience from the Berkeley Aerial Robots group, and members with experience from the two previous DARPA Grand Challenges. The ACFR team members have world-renowned experience with sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles at the theoretical and practical levels." -- BSDT
While BSDT is not one of the golden teams, this does sound like a winning combination of resources and prior DARPA Grand Challenge experience.
One of the required items on each of the Urban Challenge race vehicles is an e-stop. This is a remote shut down for the range safety officer to use if a vehicle goes crazy in the race. It is a relative of the safety switch you may have see used in Monster Truck shows. The government will provide the e-stops used in the race itself but until them each of the teams is required to provide their own. This is a $10,000 item if the team wants to buy one from the company that makes them for the government.
There are several pages in the rules that detail the operation of the e-stop that the teams must construct or buy. Basically the three states are RUN, PAUSE, and DISABLE. Run is what you might expect it to be; it is run-enable, allowing the vehicle to follow its program. Pause is used to bring the vehicle to a temporary halt for administrative action that will not count against the vehicles time. Disable had been called "stop" in earlier versions of the rules and caused a lot of confusion. Now called Disable, its action is clear. Disable shuts down the vehicle and sets the brakes (and eliminates the vehicle from the race).
Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team's vehicle named "No. 5"
DARPA clarifications on each of these e-stop states are meant to be treated as part of the rule. Officials have said that they will only use the Disable function as a last resort and are likely to use it late. It will only be used when there is a concern for safety of personnel - crashing into another unoccupied vehicle is not a safety concern. Pause is supposed to bring the vehicle to a controlled stop (as opposed to a locked wheel panic stop) and a further clarification of the rules mentions that it should continue to steer itself until it comes to a stop. In the past race there was a note that the vehicle should be prepared to wait in a paused condition overnight if necessary and TerraMax did do that in the last race. This time it is all supposed to be over within one day starting at sunrise so the long pause warning has been dropped from this set of rules. Disable - this one signals disaster for the team and their vehicle. If used the vehicle has been disqualified from the race. The earlier rules had Disable shutting down, powering down, and depressurizing all systems, recent versions of the rules are less harsh focusing more now on stopping the engine and setting the brakes. The race will start with the race officials testing the e-stop in each of its states which means that they will be Disabled at the start of the race - teams have five minutes to recover their vehicle from that and cross the start line. This, as you might expect, can cause all kinds of havoc with complex systems and getting them to reinitialize. Plan for it.
Team #09 Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team
July 16, 2007
Team #09 on my list is Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team and as you might guess they are from Berkeley, CA."The Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team is made up of researchers from UC Berkeley and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. The team represents a unique collaboration between two very strong groups in the area of field robotics and control. From UC Berkeley this includes real-time avionics experience from the Berkeley Aerial Robots group, and members with experience from the two previous DARPA Grand Challenges. The ACFR team members have world-renowned experience with sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles at the theoretical and practical levels." -- BSDT
While BSDT is not one of the golden teams, this does sound like a winning combination of resources and prior DARPA Grand Challenge experience.
One of the required items on each of the Urban Challenge race vehicles is an e-stop. This is a remote shut down for the range safety officer to use if a vehicle goes crazy in the race. It is a relative of the safety switch you may have see used in Monster Truck shows. The government will provide the e-stops used in the race itself but until them each of the teams is required to provide their own. This is a $10,000 item if the team wants to buy one from the company that makes them for the government.
There are several pages in the rules that detail the operation of the e-stop that the teams must construct or buy. Basically the three states are RUN, PAUSE, and DISABLE. Run is what you might expect it to be; it is run-enable, allowing the vehicle to follow its program. Pause is used to bring the vehicle to a temporary halt for administrative action that will not count against the vehicles time. Disable had been called "stop" in earlier versions of the rules and caused a lot of confusion. Now called Disable, its action is clear. Disable shuts down the vehicle and sets the brakes (and eliminates the vehicle from the race).
Berkeley-Sydney Driving Team's vehicle named "No. 5"
DARPA clarifications on each of these e-stop states are meant to be treated as part of the rule. Officials have said that they will only use the Disable function as a last resort and are likely to use it late. It will only be used when there is a concern for safety of personnel - crashing into another unoccupied vehicle is not a safety concern. Pause is supposed to bring the vehicle to a controlled stop (as opposed to a locked wheel panic stop) and a further clarification of the rules mentions that it should continue to steer itself until it comes to a stop. In the past race there was a note that the vehicle should be prepared to wait in a paused condition overnight if necessary and TerraMax did do that in the last race. This time it is all supposed to be over within one day starting at sunrise so the long pause warning has been dropped from this set of rules. Disable - this one signals disaster for the team and their vehicle. If used the vehicle has been disqualified from the race. The earlier rules had Disable shutting down, powering down, and depressurizing all systems, recent versions of the rules are less harsh focusing more now on stopping the engine and setting the brakes. The race will start with the race officials testing the e-stop in each of its states which means that they will be Disabled at the start of the race - teams have five minutes to recover their vehicle from that and cross the start line. This, as you might expect, can cause all kinds of havoc with complex systems and getting them to reinitialize. Plan for it.
Posted by Paul Grayson on July 16, 2007 | Comments (0)
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