VIRGINIA TECH GRAND CHALLENGE TEAM |
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by Me.Vt.Edu Grand Challenge 2005 Report to Congress Virginia Tech Leads DARPA Effort to Develop New, Shape-Changing Materials, by eng.vt.edu
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teams at Virginia Tech The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007. The DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated military supply missions in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions. What is the Urban Challenge? The DARPA Urban Challenge is an autonomous vehicle research and development program with the goal of developing technology that will keep warfighters off the battlefield and out of harm’s way. The Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles maneuvering in a mock city environment, executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles. The program is conducted as a series of qualification steps leading to a competitive final event, scheduled to take place on November 3, 2007. The exact location will be announced before the National Qualification Event scheduled for October 2007. DARPA is offering $2M for the fastest qualifying vehicle, and $1M and $500,000 for second and third place. This program is an outgrowth of two previous DARPA Grand Challenge autonomous vehicle competitions. The first Grand Challenge event was held in March 2004 and featured a 142-mile desert course. Fifteen autonomous ground vehicles attempted the course and no vehicle finished. In the 2005 Grand Challenge, four autonomous vehicles successfully completed a 132-mile desert route under the required 10-hour limit, and DARPA awarded a $2 million prize to “Stanley” from Stanford University.
Grand Challenge 2004
Website What is an autonomous ground vehicle? An autonomous ground vehicle is a vehicle that navigates and drives entirely on its own with no human driver and no remote control. Through the use of various sensors and positioning systems, the vehicle determines all the characteristics of its environment required to enable it to carry out the task it has been assigned. Why develop autonomous vehicles? The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2001, Public Law 106-398, Congress mandated in Section 220 that “It shall be a goal of the Armed Forces to achieve the fielding of unmanned, remotely controlled technology such that… by 2015, one-third of the operational ground combat vehicles are unmanned.” DARPA conducts the Urban Challenge program in support of this Congressional mandate. Every “dull, dirty, or dangerous” task that can be carried out using a machine instead of a human protects our warfighters and allows valuable human resources to be used more effectively. Who are the teams? The Urban Challenge teams come from across the United States and around the world, and share a passion for the advancement of robotic technology and machine intelligence. This diverse group includes teams from both academia and the robotics, automotive, and defense industries. Some teams are affiliated with organizations, others are groups of volunteers who have come together specifically for the challenge. Each is working to develop a vehicle to complete the 60-mile urban course in less than six hours. Please visit the Teams page for more information. What are Tracks A and
B? The application period closed in October 2006. Team leaders apply to participate more than one year before the event by providing DARPA with basic information on their teams and vehicles. From this point, teams undergo a rigorous evaluation and qualification process: demonstration videos are due in April 2007, technical papers are due in June 2007, and site visit tests are conducted in July 2007. Teams that are successful will be invited to participate in the National Qualification Event in October 2007, where they will compete for the chance to participate in the Urban Challenge Final Event. Eleven of the 89 teams participating, the “Track A” teams, applied for and received seed funding for development of their vehicle. The 78 “Track B” teams are entirely self-supported. More Information DARPA Grand Challenge Wikipedia entry. $2 Million to Fastest Urban Robot “Red Herring,” December 9, 2006 Tinkerers Working On Driverless Vehicle That Can Navigate A City Scripps News Service, November 21, 2006 Robot Cars Rev Up For The City CNN.com, November 15, 2006 DARPA's Tough New Robot Road Test “Popular Mechanics,” January, 2007 $3.5 Million Restored for Urban Robo-Race MSNBC, December 8, 2006 Pentagon Restores Prize in Robot Race Associated Press, December 12, 2006 “The Economist,” December 2, 2006
News News
04.04.06 - Kentland Farms selected
Welcome to the TeamVictor Tango Homepage Team V ictor T ango is comprised of Virginia Tech undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and a Virginia Tech autonomous systems spin off company, Torc Technologies. The team is competing in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. This competition pushes the limits of robotics, requiring teams to develop completely autonomous ground vehicles capable of navigating an urban environment. Vehicles must be able to perceive roads, road markings, and other traffic while planning an optimal route, avoiding collisions, making three point turns, parking, and adhering to the rules of the road. Building off previous development work, team V ictor T ango will be entering it's vehicle "Odin" into the Darpa Urban Challenge. Odin is a JAUS interoperable, drive by wire converted, 2005 Ford hybrid Escape that utilizes sensor technologies such as computer vision, laser rangefinders, differential GPS and inertial measurement.
News Headlines:
3-13-2007
2-28-2007
2-18-2007 Ready for the challenge The opportunity to work on Virginia Tech's Urban Challenge entry draws students to TORC, a robotics development company. Angela Manese-Lee BLACKSBURG -- When Ruel Faruque earned his master's degree in December, the mechanical engineering student said he had four job offers dangling "top secret space projects," roles in established organizations and salaries in the $65,000 to $70,000 range. But Faruque opted for a newly created position with TORC Technologies, a small, two-year-old robotics development company in VT KnowledgeWorks, the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center's business incubator. The job comes with a $50,000 salary, a small desk by the door and one very significant perk: the chance to work on Virginia Tech's Urban Challenge entry. "It was the reason I came to TORC," Faruque said. The Urban Challenge is a competition sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that aims to accelerate the development of autonomous ground vehicle technologies. Participating teams work to develop, and race, vehicles that can travel a 60-mile course through traffic -- with no human driver and no remote control. DARPA, the central research and development arm of the Department of Defense, has sponsored two previous challenges. In the most recent, in 2005, teams raced autonomous vehicles on a 132-mile desert course. Virginia Tech's entries finished eighth and ninth out of 25 by distance covered, and a team from Stanford University walked away with the $2 million prize. For years, Faruque and TORC's three other new hires worked on similar competitions as Tech students, squeezing projects between classes and research assistant duties. The hands-on experience gave them marketable skills, whet their appetite for careers in robotics and eventually landed them an opportunity few of their peers can boast. "I'm getting paid to work on what I was essentially volunteering to do before," said Andrew Bacha, a recent TORC hire. In the next nine months, TORC will work under subcontract to create the software to allow Tech's Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle to sense and react to its environment. In hiring four recent graduates to do that, the eight-person company has kept local a pool of valuable knowledge -- and offered students the ability to move seamlessly from campus to corporate life. "Most students don't get to do exactly what they did as students," said Charles Reinholtz, a mechanical engineering professor who is one of several faculty advisors for the competition. "Some don't want to, but these students got involved in this and have really committed themselves to it because it's fun for them." TORC operates out of a small office suite around the corner from VT KnowledgeWorks, a tech-company incubator that launches and nurtures start-up companies like TORC. There, company president and chief executive officer Michael Fleming said, TORC specializes in "accelerated development of cutting-edge robotics technology." Of TORC's eight employees, four to five -- including all four new hires -- work on the Urban Challenge, as well as elements of the challenge entry that can be commercialized. Other employees, Fleming noted, are working on the company's five other contracts, including a partnership with a nonprofit foundation to develop a female-looking spokesrobot that talks about keeping hearts healthy and one with a professional race team to develop an in-helmet wireless communication system. In addition, TORC will release in March a wireless emergency stop system for experimental robotics projects. The product will be targeted for use in academic, government or industry applications. All told, Fleming said the firm is set to gross more than $1 million in 2007, including payment from Tech. As part of its subcontract agreement with the university, TORC receives $485,000 -- or roughly half of the seed money DARPA awarded to Tech's team -- plus the chance to earn almost $1 million more if the entry wins. The initial money covers the new employees' salaries, and in so doing, it enabled TORC to double its workforce, Fleming said. But for TORC, a fledgling firm that has yet to do any real marketing, the benefits of working on the Urban Challenge are more than just monetary. Simply participating in the competition brings the company exposure that can lead to future contracts. "DARPA has essentially challenged any team, university or company who wants to participate with one of the most difficult unmanned system programs ever," Fleming said. And "we're able to develop a lot of software algorithms that have applications elsewhere in the unmanned system community -- we have already had some large defense companies contact us and are extremely interested." Thus far, most of TORC's work has come in through referrals -- many from Tech alums who went to school with Fleming and his colleagues and are now employed at larger companies. Beyond the money and marketing, perhaps the biggest advantage the Urban Challenge carries is the chance to compete for employees who might otherwise look to better known and better paying companies. Companies, like "your Boeings, your Lockheed Martins, your Northrop Grummans, your AAIs," Fleming said. And, within the booming unmanned and autonomous vehicle industry, the demand for people with project know-how is high. "We're always interested in people with this experience," said Brett Leedy, a design engineer with General Dynamics Robotics Systems who graduated from Tech in 2006. "Whenever you're talking about doing design and development with robots, you're talking about people who are not just mechanical engineers and not just electrical engineers." Working on competitions requires using a variety of engineering applications, Leedy said, and "someone who has that type of experience starts with a leg up." Jerry Lane, director of the Great Lakes office for Applied Research Associates, co-founded the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International in 1992. He called the competition, and others like it, "fabulous recruiting resources." "I told my boss, you could walk into there blindfolded and pick a winner," Lane said. "These competitions really bring out the best of the best." Before TORC was founded, Reinholtz said he watched a number of Tech's best move out of the area for work. "My feeling was, it would be really fun to have a company here that could hire the students and keep them local and we could continue to work with them," the professor said. With TORC, that pipeline was born. "Everybody that they're hiring could go out into industry and make more money and have a good career," Reinholtz said of TORC. "They're hiring people at probably below market rate because these people want to be part of a growing company." Indeed, new employees Faruque, Bacha and Cheryl Bauman all said one major factor in their decision to join TORC was the opportunity to shape the company as it grows. And all three plan on staying with the firm well beyond the urban challenge's November race date. "If we went to another company, we'd be starting at the bottom and have to learn about the company," said Bauman, who came to work for TORC a month after completing her master's at Tech. "With this company, we already kind of know what's involved with robotics and we've been working on it for the past couple years -- it's neat to be able to take what you're doing in school and immediately come out into the work world and do it." Even if that means seeing a little less on their paycheck. "We definitely didn't take this job for the money," Bacha said. "We're hoping, if we build the company, things will hopefully change. ... But if we were going after the money, we probably would have taken other jobs."
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