The 2007 Darpa grand challenge is a 100 km race between autonomous vehicles in an urban environment. This paper presents the results of kinematic motion study in order to quantify the minimum perception range requirements of a canonical set of manoeuvres that are required for the event. The paper also considers the potential advantage that a course reversal strategy may provide competitors that...

This paper reports on various aspects of the Intelligent Vehicle Systems (IVS) team’s involvement in the recent 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, wherein our platform, the autonomous “XAV-250,” competed as one of the 11 finalists qualifying for the event. We provide a candid discussion of the hardware and software design process that led to our team’s entry, along with lessons learned at this event a...

A taxonomic study was conducted to clarify the relationships of two bacterial populations belonging to the genus Weissella. A total of 39 strains originating mainly from Malaysian foods (22 strains) and clinical samples from humans (9 strains) and animals (6 strains) were analysed using a polyphasic taxonomic approach. The methods included classical phenotyping, whole-cell protein electrophores...

We present a case study in the design of an autonomous robotic software subsystem for managing mission execution and discrete traffic interaction in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Its role is reviewed in the context of the overall software system that controls “Boss”, Tartan Racing’s winning entry in the competition. Design criteria are presented, followed by the application of design principl...

The idea that somemedical procedures are unnecessary and can do more harm than good is as old as medicine itself. In Mesopotamia 38 centuries ago, Hammurabi proclaimed a law threatening overzealous surgeons with the loss of a hand or an eye. In 1915, at the height of a surgical vogue for prophylactic appendicectomy, Ernest Codman offended his Boston colleagues with a cartoon (figure⇓) mocking t...

In November 2007 the international competition DARPA Urban Challenge took place on the former George Airforce Base in Victorville, California to significantly promote the research and development on autonomously driving vehicles for urban environments. In the final race only eleven out of initially 89 competitors participated and “Boss” from Carnegie Mellon University succeeded. This paper summ...

A novel probabilistic perception algorithm is presented as a real-time joint solution to data association, object tracking, and object classification for an autonomous ground vehicle in all-weather conditions. The presented algorithm extends a Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filter originally built with a particle filter for data association and a Kalman filter for multi-object tracking (Miller et a...

The DARPA Urban Challenge required robots to drive 60 miles on suburban roads while following the rules of the road in interactions with human drivers and other robots. Tartan Racing’s Boss won the competition, completing the course in just over 4 hours. This paper describes the software infrastructure developed by the team to support the perception, planning, behavior generation, and other art...

Robot navigation in urban environments requires situational reasoning. Given the complexity of the environment and the behavior specified by traffic rules, it is necessary to recognize the current situation to impose the correct traffic rules. In an attempt to manage the complexity of the situational reasoning subsystem, this paper describes a finite state machine model to govern the situationa...