DARPA Urban Challenge CMU robot video

[Admin]

CMU has video up of their new Urban Challenge vehicle.

"The Urban Challenge is a 60-mile skill competition of driverless vehicles through streets and intersections. Urban Challenge vehicles must drive effectively and safely, react and interact with other traffic, and reason about intention. This competition will be held November 3, 2007."

[youtube=425,350]45T6vCrXg9M[/youtube]

The CMU Red Team worked on their Grand Challenge robot in the same lab I did for my own robots for about two years, so I was very exposed to the project. Watching these videos its obvious they have made significant improvements in their technology since then

[youtube=425,350]6SfaCkhhQT8[/youtube]

Its a huge improvement from the old days when CMU pioneered autonomous vehicles:

[youtube=425,350]5-acCtyKf7E[/youtube]

[hgordon]

Given the state of the art in 1994, it's surprising that CMU's entries didn't use vision in the last Grand Challenge.  I suppose they decided that it was just a basic GPS nav challenge that could rely on LIDAR for obstacle avoidance.  In any case, the new vehicles look good, and it should be an interesting competition this year.

[vidam]

I'm looking for Urban Grand Challenge Competition video footage such as the PBS Nova video published here for the 2004 Grand Challenge?
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/)

[Admin]

Nova video published here for the 2004 Grand Challenge?

If you watch carefully, you will see me in that video

(serious, and not in the background either)