Control Engineering

Team #21 i-Team
August 17, 2007

"It was an important step to have autonomous ground vehicles that can navigate and drive across open and difficult terrain from city to city. But the next big leap will be an autonomous vehicle that can navigate and operate in traffic, a far more complex challenge for a 'robotic' driver. So this November we are very excited to be moving from the desert to the city with our Urban Challenge."

Dr. Tony Tether, Director, DARPA, testified before the U.S. House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee, Terrorism and Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee, on March 21, 2007. 

Team #21 on my list of DARPA Urban Challenge teams is i-Team from Campbell, CA.  There is an 'I' in this team. A small group of privately funded individuals make up this team, which hopes to see what a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking can result in.  They are a Track "B" team - which means they are doing everything at their own expense and didn't get a million dollar development grant from DARPA - which can be discoraging for some people.   

  

This is an early picture of "Click", i-Team's autonomous vehicle.  An unfortunate typo in this story has caused the Control Eng Mag website to display this story oddly.  Until it is corrected, this story begins at the bottom of the column and finishes at the top.  You probably have your own stories about technical glitches and how they have affected you personally.  It is not supposed to be, but it is part of life in the age of high technology. This just goes to show how amazing it is that there are three dozen driverless vehicles reaching the final stages of development for the DARPA Urban Challenge and fifty three more vehicles not far behind them.



This is a picture of the i-Team.  If you see these people around, have them contact me. There is more to their story and I would like to tell it.  I have contacted Campbell's mayor Daniel E. Furtado to see if he or someone he knows could persuade i-Team to share the story of their race to the D U C starting line with us.  Stay tuned for updates.




This is one of the photos released by DARPA of the race route in Victorville CA.  Of course missing from this picture is the swarms of vehicles that will be clogging the streets, creating the urban traffic that the race vehicles will have to contend with.  The throng of spectators, technical observers, judges, support vehicles, pit crews, dignatarites and while not part of this race but still feared - ball rolling into the street.  It is not the ball that is the problem, it is the kid who might be chasing after it into the path of traffic.  The second greatest fear amoung team leaders is the kid on a bicycle.  Nearly as difficult to guard against as the kid chasing a ball.  Pedestrians were part of the last race so they are not going to be tested for in this race.  Perhaps we will come back to the pedestrian problem in the fourth race?

GO ROBOTS !

Posted by on August 17, 2007 | Comments (0)