Unmanned UA car will negotiate traffic
by Larry Copenhaver on Oct. 25, 2006, under Education, Local
Dwaine Jungen of Preferred Chassis Fabrication Inc. uses a wired control to operate a vehicle that will be outfitted to drive itself.
You may have heard about the motor-home owner who supposedly set the cruise control, then retired to the galley to make a sandwich.
The vehicle ended up in the ditch.
But University of Arizona engineers, with lots of help from private-sector engineers and fabricators, think they can do better at keeping an unmanned vehicle on the right path – even in simulated city traffic.
The group, Team Scorpion, is one of 10 U.S. groups to receive a $1 million grant from the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They will compete in the Nov. 7, 2007, Urban Challenge race for autonomous vehicles. The race will be held at an undisclosed location.
The goal is to find military applications, said Brian Ten Eyck, director of research support in electrical and computer engineering at UA. For example, vehicles could carry supplies or complete reconnaissance without a human on board.
An example of such an application could be driving through Baghdad, said UA research Professor Larry Head of the department of systems and industrial engineering.
Team Scorpion, managed by Raytheon Co., also includes Preferred Chassis Fabrication of Tucson, Tucson Embedded Systems and iRobot of Burlington, Mass.
“We want to design it in a way that its cognitive brain, and the chassis itself, can accommodate different kinds of modular sensors,” Ten Eyck explained.
Raytheon is furnishing sensor technology and Preferred Chassis is providing a robotic version of a Scorpion rock-crawling vehicle. That vehicle is commercially available in a manned version and Preferred Chassis founder Dwaine Jungen has built a remote-controlled version that will be modified so it can drive itself.
Tucson Embedded Systems will build the computing platform and iRobot will provide the perceptual environment to sense where the vehicle is and where obstacles and other vehicles are.
Jungen entered the DARPA competition in 2003 and 2005 but won neither. Those competitions involved robotic vehicles, but did not seek to simulate urban traffic.
For this effort, UA engineers will provide “intelligent systems capability” that will integrate traffic analysis and sensor data to make decisions on how the vehicle will negotiate situations.
“If we are coming up to a stop sign and want to make a turn, we’ll provide the information on how that’s done,” said Head.
The vehicle must be able to safely drive itself and it must be able to obey California traffic laws, Head added. There will be no way to help the vehicle once the challenge begins.
See the car at UA
Team Scorpion will display its robotic car Nov. 10 at Student Union Circle, near the Second Street parking garage off North Mountain Avenue. From 11 a.m. to noon engineers will host a discussion of the challenge program and UA’s participation.
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ON THE WEB
For more on the DARPA Challenge, go to www.team-scorpion.com.
