DARPA Grand Challenge

> - One of the highlights of the day was really Alice running on the
> berm. The bots left the starting chute going north Las Vegas bound,
> spend some time on the dry lake then return to another pass close to
> the stands (very well thought for entertaining purposes). While we
> were watching other teams being released from the starting chute,
> suddenly everybody was "woooow". Then I looked at the berm and there
> it was alice. She came close to those big concrete islands, run over
> it and was climbing the berm when I think the shadow vehicle hit the
> e-stop. Otherwise I believe it would succesfully climb the berm,
> tear the fence apart and just continue forward towards the
> crowd.... it looked like a tractor.

Similar experience here - our team, Insight Racing, launched about 10
minutes after Terra Max. I was video taping our truck moving off in
the distance, probably about a mile out when all the sudden I hear the
crowd "ooooohhhh" off to my right and turned to see Alice nosed up on
the berm looking skyward.

It took forever for DARPA to clear Alice from the course and we were
paused for a while along with Terra Max and the others behind here.
When we did finally come back by the spectator stand, you might
remember use - the white Chevy Suburban that was weaving and canyoning
down the road. Our magnetic compass was apparently off by 10 or 15
degrees though we had just calibrated the day before and it was on
perfect. Perhaps all the power lines down that 8 mile dry lake bed
had a bad effect on it we don't know.

Regarding Terra Max saying the wind was high - it was very much so.
We were experiencing heavy dust clouds affecting our LIDAR and the
high winds also broke a strap tha supports the LIDAR sun screen,
causing it to flap down in front of the LIDAR intermittently. The
LIDAR is used for obstacle avoidance and the flapping was causing an
"obstacle" to termittantly appear right in front which was also
contributing to the weaving.

When we saw it pass us by the spectator area in that condition we
thought it won't be long now. We really didn't want to go down like
Alice, though, right in front of all those people. But the "Desert
Rat" was tenacious and did not give up - we went another 20 miles like
that, passing the likes of Princeton, UCLA, Cornell and Cal Tech.

The frustrating thing is that if we had not had the above problems, we
could have gone quite a bit farther. But that's the breaks. We
aren't complaining.

Regarding Ensco, we were in the bay next to them at the NQE and got to
know some of their team. Very nice folks. The funny thing is, or not
so funny, is that when we were filling our tires with Fix-A-Flat, they
were shining theirs up with Armorall. Later, after the race, one of
their team members told us that they wished they had been using
Fix-A-Flat instead :-)

The web site was not so hot at tracking. But DARPA had a 3-D display
in the "Map Room" where the whole course region was modeled on a 3-d
terrain relief surface map. Above the map, projectors projected the
whole course down from above along with each vehicle's position and
status, updated in real time. You could literally watch the vehicle
number's move along the course at their course-relative speed. While
you could not tell if a vehicle was paused (its color did not change
or anything, it just didn't move), the color would change to red if
the vehicle was e-stopped and out of the race. The "Map Room" was
very cool, but its downside was that it was too limited by space and a
long line formed outside that tent limiting access to it.

Also, there was a long time when Terra Max was paused. The reason I
heard on pretty good authority was that their chase vehicle broke down
- it overheated, or they had radio problems, or something like that.
So Terra Max was paused for a very long time due to no fault of their
own. It was always part of DARPA's plan, announced in team leader
meetings prior to the race that if they needed to shut down vehicles
and continue the next day to complete, that they would. Terra Max and
the Gray Team both were subject to this. One of the reasons given was
that in westerly directions during the late afternoon/evening hours,
the sun is very bright in the desert with it being low on the horizon
and presented a safety problem for both the robots and chase vehicles.
So the plan was to shut down at 6pm and start up again at 6am the next
morning. DARPA actually announced that The Gray team and Terra Max
would be stopped and restarted the next morning. But the Gray team
convinced DARPA to let them continue, that they did not have any
sensors that would be affected by the setting sun and DARPA let them
continue and finish on Saturday. Terra Max stopped and finished up
the next day.

-Brian
--
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/

Posted by newtype on October 16, 2005, 3:01 am

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Hi Brian, How do you feel about a civilian robot race?
Would you enter your vehicle?

thanks
Ed

Posted by Brian Dean on October 17, 2005, 11:18 pm

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On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 07:01:13AM +0000, newtype wrote:

> Hi Brian, How do you feel about a civilian robot race?
> Would you enter your vehicle?

Well, technically it's not my vehicle - I'm just 1 of a 9 person team.
Regarding a follow-up race, I doubt it. First off, I'm tired. It was
a lot of effort to do the DGC, and I could use a break. Second, a lot
of the appeal to me was the challenge of doing something that no one
had ever done before. But now that it has been done, a lot of the
appeal for a follow-up is now gone as well. But if a follow-up was
significantly different and presented new challenges, then yes, maybe.

-Brian
--
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/

Posted by Padu on October 17, 2005, 2:56 pm

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"Brian Dean" wrote

> Similar experience here - our team, Insight Racing, launched about 10
> minutes after Terra Max. I was video taping our truck moving off in
> the distance, probably about a mile out when all the sudden I hear the
> crowd "ooooohhhh" off to my right and turned to see Alice nosed up on
> the berm looking skyward.

Cool, so you guys were the Desert Rats! I was cheering for you guys and for
Monstermoto. I love to see people with very small budgets beating over
engineered limitless budgets. Congrats to your team.

> It took forever for DARPA to clear Alice from the course and we were
> paused for a while along with Terra Max and the others behind here.
> When we did finally come back by the spectator stand, you might
> remember use - the white Chevy Suburban that was weaving and canyoning
> down the road. Our magnetic compass was apparently off by 10 or 15
> degrees though we had just calibrated the day before and it was on
> perfect. Perhaps all the power lines down that 8 mile dry lake bed
> had a bad effect on it we don't know.

I wonder if magnetic compasses are really worthy for this type of
application. If you had to redesign your vehicle, would you still include it
in it?

> Regarding Terra Max saying the wind was high - it was very much so.
> We were experiencing heavy dust clouds affecting our LIDAR and the
> high winds also broke a strap tha supports the LIDAR sun screen,
> causing it to flap down in front of the LIDAR intermittently. The
> LIDAR is used for obstacle avoidance and the flapping was causing an
> "obstacle" to termittantly appear right in front which was also
> contributing to the weaving.

Indeed, one of the guys from the Terramax team was wearing a hat. We were at
that back fence waiting for Terramax to be unpaused and the wind took his
hat away... I was wondering how funny (or not) and unprobable it would be to
terramax to think the hat was an obstacle, take a detour and crash onto the
barriers just like alice. 8^)

> When we saw it pass us by the spectator area in that condition we
> thought it won't be long now. We really didn't want to go down like
> Alice, though, right in front of all those people. But the "Desert
> Rat" was tenacious and did not give up - we went another 20 miles like
> that, passing the likes of Princeton, UCLA, Cornell and Cal Tech.

Kudos!

<snip>

> The web site was not so hot at tracking. But DARPA had a 3-D display
> in the "Map Room" where the whole course region was modeled on a 3-d
> terrain relief surface map. Above the map, projectors projected the
> whole course down from above along with each vehicle's position and
> status, updated in real time. You could literally watch the vehicle
> number's move along the course at their course-relative speed. While
> you could not tell if a vehicle was paused (its color did not change
> or anything, it just didn't move), the color would change to red if
> the vehicle was e-stopped and out of the race. The "Map Room" was
> very cool, but its downside was that it was too limited by space and a
> long line formed outside that tent limiting access to it.

Exactly my thoughts... One easy thing they could've done is to position a
camera on top of that map and broadcast the image of that map, that would be
a thousand times better than that one they were using.

Final question to you guys: was it worthy? Would you enter a competition
like that again?

It would be very nice if you guys could write a short post-mortem of your
project. I know I'd be very interested.

Cheers

Padu

Posted by Brian Dean on October 17, 2005, 11:41 pm

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On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 11:56:50AM -0700, Padu wrote:

> Cool, so you guys were the Desert Rats! I was cheering for you guys
> and for Monstermoto. I love to see people with very small budgets
> beating over engineered limitless budgets. Congrats to your team.

Thanks. We think we won if you measure by miles per dollar :-)

> I wonder if magnetic compasses are really worthy for this type of
> application. If you had to redesign your vehicle, would you still
> include it in it?

We're not yet sure that was the problem, it's just a theory. We need
to analyze the log data to be sure. We just got that back a day or so
ago, so we can dig into it and see what was up. But the unit we used
is usually quite good, although can be a little finicky at times - it
is very sensitive. It's an AHRS with builtin magnetometers so it
actually gives us quite a bit of information besides just heading. It
gives us pitch, yaw, roll which we can use to determine whether we are
on an incline, detect vibration (in order to slow down on rough
sections), etc. We are quite happy with the device.

Our Novatel GPS also gives excellent heading when the truck is in
motion, but poor heading when sitting still. The AHRS is reliable
regardless of motion. Also, the GPS heading flips when we reverse,
unlike the AHRS unit which always gives the heading the truck is
pointed in. We should probably fuse the two sensors so that the best
of both complement each other.

> Indeed, one of the guys from the Terramax team was wearing a hat. We
> were at that back fence waiting for Terramax to be unpaused and the
> wind took his hat away... I was wondering how funny (or not) and
> unprobable it would be to terramax to think the hat was an obstacle,
> take a detour and crash onto the barriers just like alice. 8^)

Irony for sure. That guy would be very unpopular on the team after
that, I'm sure!

> Exactly my thoughts... One easy thing they could've done is to
> position a camera on top of that map and broadcast the image of that
> map, that would be a thousand times better than that one they were
> using.

That's a great idea - I wish DARPA would have thought of it.

> Final question to you guys: was it worthy? Would you enter a
> competition like that again?

While I'm tired from the effort, my participation on the team is
something I will remember for the rest of my life. I made some good
friends and learned a lot of things I thought I already knew. It was
a great experience. Those things are priceless, no matter how you
slice it.

Would I do it again? Not a competition exactly like that, but maybe
something similar in that it is in a field that is of interest to me
and the nature of the event is interesting itself. The GC was
interesting in part because it was so crazy to think anyone could
create a fully autonomous ground vehicle that could successfully
navigate 140 miles through an unknown rugged off-road region at useful
speeds. That had never been done before, which was part of its appeal
to me.

But now that it has been done, doing it again would be sort've
anticlimactic, IMHO.

But if another competition came along that had similar characteristics
as the DGC, then yes, most likely I would be interested in that as
well, just like the original DGC was so interesting to me.

> It would be very nice if you guys could write a short post-mortem of
> your project. I know I'd be very interested.

We most certainly will do this.

> Cheers

Likewise.

-Brian
--
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/

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