Control Engineering

Paul Grayson

Team #14 DOTMOBIL Team
July 27, 2007

Here is what they say about themselves: "Created from a gathering of small companies, large industrials and public research labs, the Dotmobil Team is mostly composed of French individuals. Together to win the challenge, our primary aim is to demonstrate the French's scientific advances in automation and robotics."  

If you do not read French, you will need to make a side trip to http://babelfish.altavista.com/ , enter the URL for the webpage you want to read, make a "from what language to what language" selection and deal with the interesting interpretations machine translation introduces. 

An earlier vehicle of theirs was named Blue Froggy but the one being prepared for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge is called DOTMOBIL.  This just happens to be the business name of their main sponsor who is deeply involved in European vehicle automation.  While this is not one of the eleven golden teams their website shows that they have done remarkable things in the past and are connected to a company who's main line of products is related directly to the city driving tasks in the DARPA Urban Challenge. 

 

My e-mails to their team leader and media contact person have both bounced and their website seems to have not been updated recently.  I am guessing that either they have gone into full stealth mode or they have lost interest in competing for the DARPA prize money while not giving up on making vehicles driverless.  Selfdriving vehicles are of course the new wave in automotive design and anyone in the vehicle business would have be keeping up on the technology by producing working examples whether they race them or not.

While checking up on this team I was whisked away to YouTube.com for a series of DARPA Urban Challenge team videos.  Lots of DARPA action to see there as well as agricultural machinery that drives itself - perhaps about 235 videos depending on which search terms you use.   One of the videos I watched several times was the tracking of an implement towed behind an agricultural tractor.  If you are trying to put rows of crops down within one half inch of where you planned to put them the complex chain of motion leading back to the seed drill is critical to compensate for.  It makes avoiding other cars in traffic look easy.  Several videos on GPS navigation, automatic steering of cars, busses, trucks, agricultural machinery and construction equipment were all there.  

One of the earliest videos I watched on driverless equipment was "Stakeless road grading".  It was a video about guiding road graders through the complex motion they are capable of to produce banked curves for high speed highway directly from the civil engineers digital plan on CD.  At the time I checked on it, it was a $185,000 option you could get for your road grader.  Of course there would be about $40,000 instillation charge and about $6,000 a years maintenance contract.  Perhaps these are the kinds of numbers that inspired DARPA to ask home inventors to build something that could drive a US Army supply truck.  By asking tiny garage companies to build a guidance system like this at their own expense, DARPA was assured that the teams would be searching for the least expensive way to accomplish the task.

Here at AIM we continue to work on our vehicle AGV WENDY DARLING.  Last night I had one of the demonstration sonar on the truck display the range to the people passing by the truck as they went to and from the Wood Room.  Sonar like these make good electronic curb feelers for driverless vehicles.

 GO ROBOTS !

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