Annual Report 2007

Building an Autonomous Vehicle for Urban Environments he blue Porsche Cayenne pulls up to a fourway intersection and stops. It waits for other traffic to pass, then proceeds through the intersection. This scene may sound normal enough, but this is no ordinary Porsche Cayenne—it thinks for itself and requires no driver. The autonomous vehicle was designed by researchers from three Georgia Tech units – GTRI, the College of Computing and College of Engineering – along with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Dubbed Sting 1, the vehicle was entered in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Urban Challenge competition during fall 2007. The Urban Challenge is the third in a series of DARPA-sponsored competitions aimed at fostering the development of robotic ground vehicle technology. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions and keep American personnel out of harm’s way. T Sting 1 was designed to drive without any human intervention and obey California traffic laws while performing maneuvers such as merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding moving obstacles. “The car needed to detect obstacles in its path and then plan and execute a different route around the obstacles,” said Tom Collins, electronics lead for the project and a GTRI principal research engineer. Eight computers were networked together through two high speed networks and programmed to know the rules of the road. This included knowing how to stay in a lane, how to overtake another vehicle, how to make turns in city traffic, how to maneuver the waiting patterns at an intersection, how to merge into traffic and how to behave in a parking lot. On marked paved roads, a camera kept the car in its lane by detecting the typical white and yellow lines that mark a driving lane. If the vision system was unable to find a lane, the car used lasers to follow the curb. Ten range finders sent out infrared laser beams that constantly scanned to provide Sting 1 with an accurate measurement of the distance to obstacles such as curbs and other vehicles. Sting 1 competed against 34 other teams in the National Qualifying Event held in October 2007 at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif. Though they did not make it to the final challenge, GTRI researchers are already thinking about how the technology could take on other tasks. “We’re also looking forward to using the technologies in applications such as autonomous lane striping for the Department of Transportation,” said Vince Camp, hardware lead and a GTRI senior research engineer. Based on a Porsche Cayenne, Sting1 was developed by researchers from Georgia Tech and SAIC for the DARPA Urban Challenge. 1 www.gtri.gatech.edu http://www.gtri.gatech.edu

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Annual Report 2007

Annual Report 2007 Contents From the Director Research at GTRI Defense and Security Health and Human Systems Energy and Environment Manufacturing Technologies Information and Communication Technologies GTRI Around the World Interdisciplinary Research Centers The Laboratories of GTRI Georgia Tech Ireland GTRI by the Numbers GTRI and Georgia Tech Supporting Breakthrough Research GTRI Professional Education The People of GTRI

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