tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73868311472823476662012-02-16T02:11:17.605-08:00Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.comBlogger271100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-50088792862633223912007-11-06T07:46:00.000-08:002007-11-06T07:47:01.102-08:00

http://geekmo.de/urban-challenge-2007/underdog-nearly-victorious/

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-17857241780752127382007-11-03T18:07:00.001-07:002007-11-03T18:07:55.897-07:00

Watch some the secrets behind Little Ben on this excellent video: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/34685/113/

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-89993108246023729972007-11-03T18:05:00.000-07:002007-11-03T18:21:56.982-07:00

This is a historic day not only for robotics but also for Penn Engineering.Little Ben has just completed a total of 19 complex driving missions in 6hours while obeying all California driving laws. Congratulations to Dan Leeand all members of the Little Ben team for this historic achievement! Theyhave all made us all so proud.In addition to Little Ben, Stanford, CMU, and Virginia Tech have

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-57626446442142190532007-11-01T16:18:00.000-07:002007-11-01T16:20:32.530-07:00

Opening ceremony will begin at 10:30 AM ET, and vehicles will begin to launch at 11:00 AM ET.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-18016394082207924612007-11-01T12:34:00.000-07:002007-11-01T12:38:00.176-07:00

Ben Franklin racing team is one of only 11 teams which will compete in the final event on Saturday Nov 3rd 9:30am ET.Watch a video of highlights from the NQE here:http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/video/DARPA_NQE_preview_high.wmv

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-34077046272102237452007-10-31T18:04:00.000-07:002007-10-31T18:15:14.473-07:00

Ben qualified for the Urban Challenge Final event!!!The Ben Franklin Racing team is one of only 6 teams, out of 35 teams that arrived to the National Qualifying Event, that were qualified early for the Urban Challenge race.Great Work ....Watch the final event in a live webcast from Victorville, CA on Nov. 3rd 2007 starting 6:20 PT.In a message from the trenches:Dear All,We have just heard that

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-86388283322839411732007-10-19T10:38:00.000-07:002007-10-19T10:43:54.249-07:00

The team is about to leave to Victorville, CA. For the National Qualification Event (NQE) which will be held between October 26 - November 1.35 teams and their vehicles will compete in a qualification round for a chance to compete in the finals. The finalists will be announced on November 1.On Saturday November 3rd there will be a live webcast of the final Urban Challenge event.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-39340697812997710342007-09-17T07:51:00.000-07:002007-09-17T07:55:34.742-07:00

This little car can drive itself homeAllentown Morning Call - Allentown,PA,USA... of grounds for the driverless vehicle developed by engineers from Lehigh, the University of Pennsylvania and the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. ...

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-20441479674270194962007-08-30T09:34:00.000-07:002007-08-30T09:37:13.815-07:00

We're continuing testing. In the mean time we've rented a shipping container for secure storage of Ben.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-84100733374714181162007-08-12T10:08:00.000-07:002007-08-12T10:11:23.767-07:00

I'm proud to announce that we are one of the 36 teams selected for the semi-final event starting October 26th. The Darpa Press Release is here http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/docs/PR_UC_Semifinalist_Announcement.pdfCongrats to all the other teams!

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-36323362503606381242007-07-24T20:42:00.000-07:002007-07-24T20:44:16.303-07:00

Here's a video of our performance at the site visit.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-74758531503715986582007-07-10T11:53:00.000-07:002007-07-10T11:54:19.751-07:00

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-18883845554600564342007-07-08T22:40:00.001-07:002007-07-08T22:47:04.700-07:00

Sorry for the long delay in posting. We've been working hard on the vehicle and have made good progress.Today we completed our official site visit. We successfully completed all 4 missions in approximately two hours and had time for a few extra demonstrations.Photos are below. And hopefully we'll have a video to post soon as well.Thank you to all our fans who came out to support us on this hot

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-72852315390449650182007-05-25T13:41:00.000-07:002007-05-25T13:44:47.858-07:00

There are new photos of the latest generation of sensor roof rack as well as new photos of the EMC system and computing rack.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-53811367547042067492007-05-21T08:26:00.000-07:002007-05-21T08:29:52.926-07:00

We made it up to Lehigh by midday and had a good afternoon of testing.We successfully logged performance data for trajfollower.We also drove the site visit course again now with OmniStar DGPS coverage. I successfully tested the distributed logging on the RT3K module, however the combination of Xforwarding, rendering, and NFS caused problems with the velodyne logging in this manner. So we

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-55123468959613504292007-05-11T08:30:00.000-07:002007-05-11T08:34:26.684-07:00

"The Ben Franklin Racing Team has been selected to receive a site visit by DARPA officials in June 2007 ... "Dr. Tony Tether, Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-18453381404334667302007-04-24T20:10:00.000-07:002007-05-11T08:30:40.102-07:00

Good news,We successfully demonstrated intersection navigation to the level required for the site visit today. Drew videotaped our driving through an intersection after waiting for a car to clear a few times.Also John and his students have laid down the centerline marking tape around the whole course and have made good looking stop lines for the intersection.We have driven around the course 3

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-4089833148424831282007-04-14T18:10:00.000-07:002007-04-14T18:22:02.940-07:00

We've spent the last few weeks working to produce our video for submission to Darpa. It's done so here it is,

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-10144163037918148862007-04-09T19:06:00.000-07:002007-04-14T17:41:49.941-07:00

We spent the day working on demonstrating intersection navigation including vehicle avoidance. We were able to demonstrate intersection navigation with empty obstacle maps. However we ran into technical difficulties when trying to translate the maps generated by the velodyne to theplanner.Paul has helped me out and the Velodyne can render beautiful point clouds in real time. Now that we have

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-76892664862861396892007-03-26T07:46:00.000-07:002007-03-26T07:48:26.542-07:00

Today we took Ben out to the car-park to test the LADAR integration with the video-demonstration code - in short, after debugging/fixing we were able to reliably transform the LADAR data into a usable map, evaluate our plan through the map and correctly identify Tully's car as an obstacle in our path, stop in front of it and then transition to the other available lane and then transition

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-60647026157244325282007-03-12T09:05:00.000-07:002007-03-13T11:46:28.376-07:00

A video of autonomous trails by little ben, the ben franklin racing team's car.Following a marked course, avoiding an unexpected pedestrian crossing the road and following a leading car.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-7493682904455936022007-02-19T08:19:00.001-08:002007-02-19T08:25:46.845-08:00

Hi there,I've got some bad news. Ben will be out of service for a little while. While we were getting Ben setup in front of the Levine loading dock, a large bunch of ice fell off the roof of Fisher Bennett and smashed our windshield, hood, and right mirror. The ladar's were on the roof and one took enough of a hit to knock it cockeyed on it's mount, but it tested ok in the lab afterwards.The

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-36234331797114703982007-02-16T11:27:00.000-08:002007-02-16T11:48:35.763-08:00

We had a really fantastic testing day today - the steering control is now really good and very smooth (no jerking steering wheel etc - it actually looks like a human is driving). We did have a reasonably persistent problem with the GPS jumping near the poles in the car park which is why we have some discrete jumps in the route traces - but this is something that we are investigating several

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-28409882456456528372007-01-18T19:19:00.000-08:002007-01-18T19:27:55.786-08:00

On Sunday we tested a new trajectory follower which is based on a value-function. The pose estimator was tested integrating all sensors including GPS, IMU, and car odametery.The video production team is working on a promotion video of little ben performing an autonomous run which will display our GUI to the brains of the car.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-73543323676867194252007-01-05T05:32:00.000-08:002007-01-05T05:34:33.926-08:00

Jim, Alex K., Heeten and I went to the Boeing lot with the Prius forthe first time on Sunday. Our objective was mainly to get acquaintedwith the site, but we also took the opportunity to do some moretesting of the trajectory-following code and a simple RNDF. Weenabled thetrajectory follower's throttle control for the first time, since we weren'twilling to risk it in the smaller lot. Everything

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-24140897541293766992006-12-09T17:08:00.000-08:002006-12-09T17:09:39.720-08:00

This afternoon/evening we took Ben out to the small road behind the USPS parking lots and managed to fix the few remaining issues with drivers and we successfully demonstrated trajectory following with Ben, following (steering control only due to the confined space) straight and curved trajectories previously driven by Tully and recorded/played back via Sheep. Attached is the proof - the results

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7386831147282347666.post-66997640154601972852006-12-09T17:04:00.001-08:002006-12-09T17:04:28.589-08:00

Little Ben - The Ben Franklin Racing Team vehicle, performing a autonomous control over the vehicle and follows a path demonstrated by an human driver.First, the path demonstrated by manual driving is recorded. In the following section Little Ben is generating steering and throttle commands based on its perceived location and heading as given by the GPS locator.

Little Benhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03675541485955978641noreply@blogger.com1