From DGC
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This is the public information page for Team Caltech, the California Institute of Technology's entry in the 2004, 2005 and 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge.
Announcements
- 30 Oct 07, 3 pm: After a second attempt at the Area A "merging" test, we were informed that Alice would not be advancing to the race this year. We had gone into the test with a set of software that we thought would significantly improve on our previous performance on Sunday, but we ended up having some unexpected problems that caused Alice to exhibit some very erratic (and unsafe) behavior. We still aren't completely sure what happened (there were multiple problems that showed up in the logs that we had not seen in testing that very morning), but given our previous performance in area A and the poor showing on the run today, DARPA decided that we would not qualify. The team has brought Alice back to Pasadena, but many of us will be out at the race on Saturday to cheer on our friends and colleagues on other teams.
- 29 Oct 07, 5 pm: Alice completed its first full run at the NQE! After running the Area C test course this morning (see below), Alice was tested in Area B in the afternoon. The Area B course consists of approximately 2 miles of driving, including a parking lot, a road with cars on each side that have to be avoided, and a region with an opening in a fence. Alice completed all of these tests and came back to the start area in 25 minutes, completing its first full run at the NQE. The logs indicate that there were some small performance issues where we still want to tune Alice's behavior, but overall the run was very good and a great accomplishment for everyone on the team!.
- Quicktime movie - Run 4 from Alice's point of view, sped up to 4X real-time
- 29 Oct 07, 12 pm: We started the day in Area C, which consists of a number of intersections with human-driven cars, of increasing complexity. Alice passed all of the tests, including an intersection with 4 cars queued up and Alice having to determine when it was its turn to go. At the end of the test Alice had to find its way past a number of blocked roads, which it did successfully until a program failed and was automatically restarted. Unfortunately, when the program was reset it forgot which roads were blocked and so it tried the same paths again.
- 28 Oct 07: Today Alice attempted the merging test at the NQE. This involved driving around on a set of roads that had 12 cars circling in the inner and outer lanes. By making a series of left turns, Alice had to repeatedly merge into the traffic and cut across opposing lanes of traffic while it followed its route. The task was made more difficult by the fact that the lanes were very narrow and had K-rails as barriers on one side. Alice completed quite a few laps, but did have a couple of aggressive merges where it came close to other vehicles. Tomorrow we have two tests: an intersection and U-turn test in the morning and a second attempt at the Area B test (navigation and parking).
- 27 Oct 07: Alice made its first attempt at the National Qualifying Event today. We had some trouble getting out of the start area due to the width of the corridor and the buffers that we place around Alice. Once we got out onto the course, we proceeded to the parking zone, where we had trouble with a tight fit between parked vehicles. Unfortunately, we ran out of our 30 minute testing window at that point and the vehicle was not able to attempt the rest of the test run. We clearly have some tuning to do on our obstacle avoidance (being a bit more aggressive, perhaps), but are confident that we can tune our system to behave well in this environment.
- 26 Oct 07: Alice passed its e-stop test today allowing it to make its first NQE attempt tomorrow (Sat) morning. Our first test will be on NQE area B, which is relatively large area with a parking zone, and obstacle zone and lots of roads to navigate. We should launch tomorrow morning between 9 and 10 am, if things stay on schedule. We'll also have a practice session scheduled for 3:40 pm in practice area 2 (a big rectangle of dirt where we can test out manuevers).
- 25 Oct 07: Alice is now in Victorville, after having spent the morning doing some final tuning at El Toro. For anyone coming out to visit, we are in pit location 101, which is right near the starting chutes (but you have to walk around to get to us). The testing schedule has shifted a bit (updated version posted on the left).
- 24 Oct 07: We will be arriving in Victorville tomorrow (Thu) to check-in for the NQE. We have spent the last week debugging our final race code and tuning its performance. We have been doing 5-10 mile runs at speeds of up to 30 miles per hour. Our biggest challenges are improving the robustness of the situation to complex driving environments and increasing the average driving speed of our vehicle on what we believe are representative runs.
- 23 Oct 07: Alice is at Pasadena Ford having a major steering fluid leak repaired. We lose another day of testing and tuning, but continue to test our system in simulation and do some late evening testing at the former St. Luke Medical Center, where we have a small test course set up.
- 21-22 Oct 07: Our test site at El Toro was closed due to high winds on Sunday and due to smoke from nearby fires on Monday.
- 20 Oct 07: Alice has its first encounter with another autonomous vehicle, MIT's Talos II, which is also testing in El Toro. Despite some confusion about who arrived at the intersection first, the vehicles managed to clear the intersection successfully (if not in the right order).
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NQE results
- Area B, attempt #1 (Sat): completed approximately 1 miles of driving; got stuck trying to park in a tight spot
- Area A, attempt #1 (Sun): made 6-7 laps of the merging test, but with several aggressive starts and a couple of near misses
- Area C, attempt #1 (Mon): completed most of the intersections and navigation test; couldn't find a path at the end due to a program malfunctioning
- Area B, attempt #2 (Mon): completed the run! Had a missed gates and some driving up on the edge of the road, but no major issues (we think)
- Area A, attempt #2 (Tue): Alice attempted three laps, exhibiting some poor behavior and having several near misses with cars during merging.
Additional Info
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Team Caltech
Caltech is participating in the 2007 Urban Challange with a student-oriented team consisting of undergraduates and graduate students, working with faculty, postdocs and industry partners. We are building on our experience in the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenges, in which Caltech succeeded in reaching the race both times. We are making use of our existing autonomous vehicle platform, Alice (right).
Team members:
- Richard Murray, Team leader
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- Joel Burdick, Team co-leader
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| Vehicle Team
| Navigation Team
| Sensing Team
| Systems Team
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- Dominic Rizzo (coord)
- Tony & Sandie Fender
- Rob Grogan
- Noele Norris
- Josh Oreman
- Jimmy Paulos
- Glenn Wagner
- Daniel Alvarez
- William David Carrillo
- Arthur Chang
- Iain Cranston
- Matthew Feldman
- Nicholas Fette
- Ken Fisher
- Nikhil Jain
- Michael Kaye
- Daniel Talancon
- Albert Wu
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- Noel duToit (coord)
- Vanessa Carson
- Stefano di Cairano
- Sven Gowal
- Magnus Linderoth
- Christian Looman
- Mark Milam (NGC)
- Kenny Oslund
- Jeremy Schwartz (NGC)
- Kristian Soltesz
- Francisco Zabala
- Lars Cremean
- Tom Duong
- Luke Durant
- Melvin Flores
- Steven Gray
- Russell Newman
- Brent Goldman
- Ghyrn Loveness
- Jerry He
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- Sam Pfister (coord)
- Mohamed Aly
- Andrew Howard
- Laura Lindzey
- Jeremy Ma
- Humberto Pereira
- Christopher Rasmussen
- Henrik Sandberg
- Tamas Szalay
- Daniele Tamino
- Pete Trautman
- Joe McDonnell
- Brandt Belson
- Philipp Boettcher
- Justin McAllister
- Miles Robinson
- David Trotz
- Yi Wang
- Johnny Zhang
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- Nok Wongpiromsarn (coord)
- Josh Doubleday
- Jessica Gonzalez
- Phillip Ho
- Robbie Paolini
- Rich Petras
- Chris Schantz
- Luke Durrant
- Julia Braman
- Edward Chen
- Steve Chien
- Jay Conrod
- Josh Feingold
- Scott Goodfriend
- Mitch Ingham
- Michael Kaye
- Aditya Khosla
- Bob Rasumussen
- Chess Stetson
- Sashko Stubailo
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(names below the horizontal line participated during the 2006-07 academic year)
What is the Urban Challenge?
The 2007 Urban Challenge is an autonomous vehicle competition that will take place on 3 November 2007, sponsored by DARPA. The competition will involve 60 miles of autonomous driving in which a vehicle must:
- Operate on city streets, obeying lane markings and traffic rules, including operation around sharp turns, through intersections, and while passing.
- Exhibit safe-following behavior when approaching other vehicles from behind in a traffic lane, including maintaining a safe-following distance.
- Exhibit safe check-and-go behavior when pulling around a stopped vehicle, pulling out of parking spot, moving through intersections, and in situations where collision is possible.
- Stay on the road and in a legal and appropriate travel lane while en route, including around sharp turns, through intersections, and while passing.
- Navigate safely in areas where GPS signals are partially or entirely blocked, including following paved and unpaved roads and stay in lane with very sparse or low accuracy GPS waypoints.
- Navigate toward a destination in a large, open area where minimal or no GPS points are provided, as in loading dock areas or parking lots. These areas may contain fixed obstacles such as parked vehicles and moving obstacles including other vehicles.
- Safely pull into and back out of a specified parking space in a parking lot.
- Safely execute one or more three-point turning maneuvers to effect a U-turn.
- Dynamically re-plan and execute the route to a destination if the primary route is blocked or impassable.
All operations must be fully autonomous (no human intervention allowed).
The vehicle completing the course in the fastest time under 6 hours will win a $2M grand prize ($1M for second, $500K for third).
More information on the 2007 Urban Challenge is available at the official DARPA web site.
