Testing Update,

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 logged in the old format as we drove with other vehicles around the site visit route.
• Dan demonstrated successful following using the matlab controller up to 17 mph forward and 15 mph in reverse in a relatively tight course.The vehicle was programmed to automatically slow for corners.
• And we were able to successfully navigate the site visit course with dense waypoints, with the problem that the tracks would drift off the road due to GPS offset.

Tully

DARPA Site Visit

"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.

Intersection Navigation Demonstrated

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 times with Little Ben to get out best estimate of it's position. This will be used to finalize our RNDF to submit this week.

Also of note we have new photos of the team up from last week.

Video Submission Completed

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

Getting the Velodyne to work

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 the
planner.

Paul has helped me out and the Velodyne can render beautiful point clouds in real time. Now that we have the correct calibration for our unit we can watch people walk down the sidewalk from 20m away, and see 5+ cars around a busy intersection. Hopefully we can post some of the recorded data into videos soon.

Tully

Video Demo - Proof of concept test

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
back to the first lane after passing Tully's car - this was all at
about 5mph.

We were also able to demonstrate that trajFollower could drive the
video-demo course that Jim laid out at park and we took the
reporter who came out with us around the course a couple of times and
she seemed suitably impressed. Heeten was also able to make
significant progress on testing the RNDF generator that uses the
google-map-esque interface.

There are still some issues that we need to resolve, primarily
concerned with the quality of the LADAR maps when driving at higher
speeds and making reasonably sharp bends, both of which frequently
lead to significant obstacles being painted into the map, although
these are rarely sufficiently high to be viewed as obstacles to plan
around by the video-demo code, the performance should be better than
it is now.

Alex

Autonomous Trails

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.