Control Engineering

Paul Grayson

Team #01 A Bunch Of Dropouts
June 27, 2007

This column is being written on the main navigation computer of my team's automatic guided vehicle AGV WENDY DARLING.  The column is being sent over the vehicle's encrypted wireless network, via the internet to the server at Control Engineering Magazine and displayed on their website for you to read.  The traditional monitor, keyboard, and mouse I am using will be replaced with a pair of touch sensitive flat screen monitors or panel PCs to create a "glass cockpit" for our Army supply truck as soon as we choose a manufacturer whose product we want to showcase.

To keep track of what the other teams are doing I have numbered them #01 thru #89.  This has been a big help to me in keeping my notes in order.  I also created a poster size scorecard to hang on the wall in our technical library.  The scorecard has the team name, its number, a business card size picture of their vehicle and a golden hallo around them if they got one of the million dollar development grants from DARPA.

Starting off in numerical order with team #01 the first things I noticed were the patriotic US flag waving paint job on a 1941 Army ambulance and the odd team name: "A Bunch Of Dropouts" the team's official registered name.  Many of the teams have equally strange names, which highlight just how unconventional this approach to government research is.

Team leader Kevin Jackson and his band of car restoration people have done an amazing job of creating a custom show car to automate.  This automatic guided vehicle with the strikingly patriotic appearance is named Self Aware Machine Intelligence or S. A. M. I.  Another sign that this is an unconventional team, the background in the vehicle's official portrait shows what it would look like on Mars. 

The impression I get from my e-mail conversations with them and going over their website in great detail is yes in spite of the hype, which might be somewhat distracting, there is solid work being done on driverless vehicles by this team.

      
#50 rolle-chain connects steering column with gear motor as both extend through the firewall.

    
This is the view of the computers when looking in through the back doors.

Kevin Jackson's team has a very practical, car builders approach to solving the problems of driverless operation in an Urban Environment.  Robots that play soccer share much of the robotics software that goes into a driverless truck.  Many of the problems they have to deal with are similar in that they require moving toward a goal, planning motion in relationship to other objects in motion, avoiding colliding with the other moving objects, blending into the flow, etc.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCup

As you can see from the picture of the engine and the suspension, the vehicle is more street rod than 1941 ambulance now, and with the computer in the back, it represents a whole new species of vehicle.  Wide tires with bead lock rims while not usually required for city streets allow the vehicle to keep moving if a tire goes flat.

Kevin is writing the software for his robot and hasn’t had time to spend on public relations.  When I chatted with him he was pushing to get his technical paper done in the 10 days he had left before it’s was due and he was trying to get his machine vision system working well enough to pass the Site Visit 38 days later but being a one man software development team with one other guy, JR Johnson - Chief Mechanic, serving as the mechanical/hardware engineering team is proving to be a tremendous challenge.  Laura is providing support services such as grading the 5-acre test track with her back-blade, sending out photos, documents to DARPA etc.

Kevin is not releasing his videos because they are not as good a quality as he would like them to be and the vehicles performance was less than what he hopes it will soon be.  Fortunately DARPA thought the vehicles performance was worth moving the team on to the next step, the Site Visit - an important hurdle in the race to be in the race.

Posted by Paul Grayson on June 27, 2007 | Comments (0)