Control Engineering

Paul Grayson

Team #18 Indiana Robotic Navigation
August 10, 2007

Team #18 on my list is Indiana Robotic Navigation (IRN).  This team has made remarkable progress even though it is neither one of the 11 teams granted a million dollars in development money nor is it one of the 36 teams listed by DARPA yesterday in their announcement. 
 

Their vehicle is named "Spirit Of Christianity" (SOC) and the dent in the passenger door marks the teams discovery of a basic robotics lesson:  when you put all the sensors on the front of a vehicle, just because the sensors have passed the obstacle does not mean that the rest of the vehicle has passed it.  

Once a team has discovered this and other real world robotics lessons, they go on to incorporate this knowledege into their design.  This is why a great deal of burn-in time in a real world environment is important - to discover any gaps in your understanding of robotics that you might have.  



As you can see from the pictures, this vehicle is still going through it's "ugly duckling" stage. Once it is know exactly what equipment it takes to get a car, bus, or truck to drive itself, the packaging of those components can be refined and stream lined.  In the prototype stage a lot of things are in their original boxes or racked, cables take their necessary routes to where ever the equipment they need to connect to happens to be.  



The use of touch screens simplifies the man-machine interface.  Although the vehicle is driverless, there is a great deal of interaction between the vehicle and the design team as the operation of the vehicle is being fine tuned.



This is the view of SOC looking in from the back showing the not yet miniturized version of IRN's driverless system.  You may recognized some of the parts.  These pictures will perhaps inspire you to build one of your own now that you see it is just a matter of hooking some common items together, adding a few sensors, and writing some clever software to stitch it all together.  




This evening my wife and I watched the movie The Astronaut Farmer.   She recognized many things that the story has in common with the teams preparing for the DARPA Urban Challenge - having lived with the race for nearly six years now.  

GO ROBOTS !

Posted by Paul Grayson on August 10, 2007 | Comments (0)