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Stanley is an autonomous car created by Stanford University's Stanford Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). It won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, earning the Stanford Racing Team a $2 million prize.


The Stanford racing team

Led by Associate Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center ...
, the Stanford Racing Team was developed solely for the purpose of competing in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Stanford did not participate in the
2004 DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...
and was considered to have 20:1 chances of winning the 2005 competition. The car is currently located at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. It was displayed at the 2006 New York International Auto Show and two years at the Volkswagen Autostadt Museum (Germany). The Stanford Racing Team entered a new vehicle, a modified Volkswagen Touareg wagon, dubbed "Junior", in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Other key contributors on the team include Michael Montemerlo (software lead), Sven Strohband (lead hardware engineer), David Stavens (roboticist/engineer), Hendrik Dahlkamp (computer vision lead), Cedric Dupont (vehicle lead), and Pamela Mahoney (communications lead).


Construction

The car began as a standard European diesel model Volkswagen Touareg provided by Volkswagen's ERL for the competition. The Stanford Racing Team chose the Touareg for its " drive by wire" control system which could be adapted (and was done so by the ERL) to be run directly from an onboard computer without the use of actuators or servo motors; however, the steering wheel was driven by an electric motor and the gear shifting accomplished with a hydraulic piston). For navigation, the car was equipped with five roof-mounted Sick AG
LIDAR Lidar (, also LIDAR, or LiDAR; sometimes LADAR) is a method for determining ranges (variable distance) by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. It can also be ...
units to build a 3-D map of the environment, thus supplementing the position sensing GPS system. An internal guidance system utilizing gyroscopes and accelerometers monitored the orientation of the vehicle and also served to supplement GPS and other sensor data. Additional guidance data was provided by a video camera used to observe driving conditions out to eighty meters (beyond the range of the LIDAR) and to ensure room enough for acceleration. Stanley also had sensors installed in a wheel well to record a pattern imprinted on the tire and to act as an
odometer An odometer or odograph is an instrument used for measuring the distance traveled by a vehicle, such as a bicycle or car. The device may be electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two ( electromechanical). The noun derives from ancient G ...
in case of loss of signal (such as when driving through a tunnel). Using the data from this sensor, the onboard computer can extrapolate how far it has traveled since the signal was lost. To process the sensor data and execute decisions, the car was equipped with six low-power 1.6 GHz Intel Pentium M based computers in the trunk, running different versions of the
Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...
operating system.


Programming

The School of Engineering developed the 100,000 lines of software run the car as well as to interpret sensor data and execute navigation decisions. Using what ''
Popular Mechanics ''Popular Mechanics'' (sometimes PM or PopMech) is a magazine of popular science and technology, featuring automotive, home, outdoor, electronics, science, do-it-yourself, and technology topics. Military topics, aviation and transportation o ...
'' described a "common robot hierarchy", the vehicle utilizes "low-level modules fed raw data from LIDAR, the camera, GPS sets, and inertial sensors into software programs o controlspeed, direction, and decision making. The vehicle featured a
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
based approach to obstacle detection. Data from the LIDARs was fused with images from the vision system to perform a distant look-ahead. If a path of drivable terrain could not be detected for at least 40 meters in front of the vehicle, speed was decreased and the LIDARs were used to locate a safe passage. To correct common errors made by the vehicle early in its development, the Stanford Racing Team created a log of "human reactions and decisions" and fed the data into a learning algorithm tied to the vehicle's controls; this action served to reduce errors. The computer log of humans driving also made the car more accurate in detecting shadows, a problem that had caused many of the vehicle failures in the
2004 DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...
.


See also

*
Simultaneous localization and mapping Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a ch ...


References


External links


Original Stanley Team Page

Summary of technical papers with movies on Stanley

Current Stanford Racing Team

Pittsburgh Post Gazette article on the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005

Scientific American article on the DARPA Grand Challenge





PBS' NOVA show on the DARPA Grand Challenge

Google TechTalk by Sebastian Thrun on winning the DARPA Grand Challenge


{{Linux devices Experimental self-driving cars Stanford University Volkswagen vehicles Linux-based devices DARPA Grand Challenge