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Science Technology

Autonomous Race Cars 137

Posted by timothy from the eyescan-ignition-coming-soon dept.
Octothorp writes: "Though not as complicated as the underwater vehicles. There is an annual competition sponsored by National Semiconductors to build an autonomous race car. They move along pretty well too, at almost 9 ft/s. More technical information on how they are built is available on a Berkeley page, and there's a video of the winning run for 2002."
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Autonomous Race Cars More

Autonomous Race Cars

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  • Real-life application? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by salimma ( 115327 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @07:08PM (#4009682) Homepage Journal
    I recall an experiment done in California a few months back whereby cars automatically drive themselves on a stretch of a highway equipped with magnetic strips down the centre of the lane.

    Since public transport seems to be out of the question for medium-distance transportation in the States (witness Amtrak's plight - and CoachUSA's financial gymnastics of late) automated private transport might fill the gap - provided price can be brought down.

    It is really interesting to see what comes out of this. Certainly more applicable in the near future than football-playing robots - or this terrible series in the UK with robots battling each other, armed with saws, hammers and whatnot contraptions..

    Curious,

    • witness Amtrak's plight

      Dude, Amtrak's "plight" is that in the USA, trains are expensive, inconvenient, and dangerous. Why would anyone ride on a train, when airplanes are so cheap and safe?

      • You forgot slow.

        To paraphrase horribly:
        Take Amtrak... please!

      • Re:Real-life application? (Score:2, Informative)

        by rueba ( 19806 )
        That depends on the route.

        On the Boston-New York-DC corridor Amtrak is doing pretty well.

        The price and travel time(once you include getting to and from the airport) are about the same.

        On the train you have enough time to read a book, do some work or just enjoy the view, no hassle with airport security and you arrive smack in the center of the city.

        For the plane you might have to travel a ways to the airport, get your nail clippers confisticated, then fly for like 30 minutes and then get try to get a cab or something into the city in snarling traffic.

        Its really a matter of preference, but it certainly seems that trains are viable in more densely populated areas.

      • Re:Real-life application? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by cduffy ( 652 )
        I've got to disagree, at least on the expense and convenience points. If I have a day's worth of coding that can be done from my laptop, and want a ride between my (ex-)home in northern California and my employer's Sunnyvale headquarters, Amtrak seems just the thing. They don't send me through a bunch of security getting on the train, don't make me turn off my equipment at any time, and cost about 1/4 of what a plane ticket does ($70 vs $400) -- plus they connect directly to Caltrain, which takes me to within a few blocks of my final destination. Yes, they're slow -- but if my office happens to be wherever I am, that doesn't really matter so much.
      • Trip from Seattle to spokane,
        Plane - 1-2 hours (45 minute flight), 99 bux.
        Train - 12 hours, 25 bux.
        Auto - 4:30 hours, 25-40 bux in gas.

        Sometimes its easier to drive, and you dont need to rent a car when you get there. Trains would work, if they where high-speed, and had more runs.

        YMMV (haha)
        • Train - 12 hours, 25 bux.
          Auto - 4:30 hours, 25-40 bux in gas.

          Trains must have some serious problem in the US. Here's some stats from EU:

          short trip (300km), high-speed train:

          Train - 1 hour 30 minutes
          Car - 3 hours

          longer trip (800km), normal train

          Train - 7/8 hours
          Car - 8 hours (including stops, etc)
          • Trains must have some serious problem in the US. Here's some stats from EU:

            Yes, trains have a huge problem in the US - They're mostly run by Amtrack. Amtrack is a sorta half-governmental entity that runs way in the red, provides crap service and costs too much, surviving mostly off of a series of governmental handouts. They know this, and thus they spend most of their time trying to cater to the various congress critters that bail them out (but only enough to keep the old decripit system running, as opposed to enough to actually implement decent high speed rail) instead of trying to make the system not suck.

      • Amtrack's plight is...

        In the 1930s, with the Great Depression reducing the market for personal automobiles, General Motors Corporation made a push to convert all U.S. transit systems to rubber-tired diesel buses. This effort was supported by Congress, which, in 1935, passed the Public Utility Holding Company Act, requiring most power companies to divest themselves of public transit operations. General Motors purchased transit systems across the nation through its subsidiary, National City Lines. They quickly turned around and bought diesel buses from the parent company and discontinued rail service. The rails were abandoned, often paved over in the city streets, although many ended up being salvaged for their steel once World War II began.

        Thieved from here [iatransit.com]. Here's something a bit more cheerful [2600.com] though :)

        Ali

    • I recall an experiment done in California a few months back whereby cars automatically drive themselves on a stretch of a highway equipped with magnetic strips down the centre of the lane.

      This was more than a few months back, but one of the researchers invovled in the path project was the instructor for the vehicle course at Berkeley.

      http://www.path.berkeley.edu/
    • I recall an experiment done in California a few months back whereby cars automatically drive themselves on a stretch of a highway equipped with magnetic strips down the centre of the lane.

      I think this is great for those idiots that can't pick a lane and/or tailgate. Seein that they don't drive good let computers do it or at least help 'em. Like that Volvo concept car that squaks when you tailgate.
    • >whereby cars automatically drive themselves on a >stretch of a highway equipped with magnetic >strips down the centre of the lane. sorry, but this is useless. you spend just as much gas whether you drive or your laptop is. that's the biggest problem right now. and since the laptop has to be "safe" your car will move slower and contribute to congestions.
      • It's not really necessarily true that it will contribute to congestion. Going slow doesn't necessarily lead to congestion. Traffic is a complicated subject, but if the computers had certain rules defined, depending on how the rules were formed, less congestion might result, but it depends on the rules. For example, if the rule is "immediately go try to slip into any gap or opening," which is the rule that most people use, then congestion will result. But if proper rules are formed, it could lead to much less congestion, regardless of speed. I'd imagine if there was some sort of radio communication between the cars, or even a centralized computer traffic controller, then we might have a highly efficient and congestion free roadway system. Lower speed doesn't really mean higher congestion.
        • All else being equal.

          There are 3 basic factors that govern the throughput of a road.

          1) number of lanes
          2) spacing between cars
          3) speed of cars

          There are various others such as road condition, length of the cars, weather, etc. but these are the main ones considered when designing a roadway.

          If you pick a number for the amount of traffic that is carried on a road, say 10K cars per hour; then divide by the number of lanes, say 2, you get 5K/hour/lane. Obviously, adding lanes will help, but we have not yet completed the formulation.

          A car must have a finite length. This is deduced from the limiting case. If a car was infinitely long, the lane could never carry more than 1 car, ever.

          The next point is spacing, since we are giving a car a finite length, and we do want the lane to carry more than one car, if there is the minimum of 2, then there must be a space between them. Again, the limits are natural. If we want to have more than one car, the space must be less than infinity and if we want to have maximum density, we could use zero. We can use this "zero option" to our advantage. To make things easier, we will dispense with the spacing and redefine the length of the car to be the distance from the front of one to the front of the next.

          To see how speed influences things, we consider the limit of zero. Again it is obvious that our lane will only carry one car, or none, ever. For any speed greater than 0, the traffic capacity of the lane is simply car_length/speed.

          Anything that can be done to decrease the length(spacing) or increase the speed will increase the traffic capacity of our lane. Spacing requirements can be reduced by making cars lighter, installing better braking systems and reducing the reaction time of the driver. Speed improvements can be had by making the road smoother, improving suspension design, and aerodynamics.

          If you define congestion as any state where the lane is not producing its optimal throughput and reduced spacing is forcing a reduction in speed, then you can see that reducing the spacing(length) while maintaining speed is helpful and so is a speed increase while maintaining spacing.

          We have made lighter cars, better brakes, smoother roads, improved aerodynamics and suspensions. Guess what's left?
          • Your use of the word "throughput" reveals that you've got the completely wrong model in your head. This isn't like electricity, or data, you can't reduce traffic that much. Traffic doesn't flow like a liquid, nor like sand. You're right, absolute speed is the only way to measure congestion. But if the absolute speed is 45, and you think that's too low, ask yourself if you'd prefer sitting in traffic at 6 miles an hour. As long as it's managed properly, then lowering speed won't lead to congestion. It will lead to lower speeds. But if the traffic is no longer properly manageable at high speeds (say a somewhat narrow road, with a lot of turns) then they have to slow it down to manage everything. That doesn't mean congestion though.
            • > Your use of the word "throughput" reveals that
              > you've got the completely wrong model in your head

              I think that you have it backwards. Throughput is exactly what we are talking about. There is a reason that the same terminology is used in data transport design and people transport design. The reason being, that is the same thing that we are measuring or talking about.

              Throughput, traffic capacity, latency, all apply, with the same basic concepts to both fields of engineering.

              Latency is how long it takes to get from one end to the other.

              Throughput is how much can go through in a given time.

              Just as with data transport, in people or car transport, throughput is measured in "desired-units" transported per unit of time. We are talking about bits per second, bytes per second, or cars/people per hour. The same principles apply. Make the "desired-unit" shorter and throughput goes up. The spacing of bits at 100MHz is shorter than at 10MHz. A 100MHz data transport has higher throughput than a 10MHz one, all else being equal. In data transport the actual speed is nearly fixed so the only options are to add lanes(make a wider bus) or decrease the spacing of the bits. In the people transport field there is more room to maneuver.

              A road that is densely packed with narrow inter-car spacing will have high throughput and long latency. The long latency is produced because the short spacing forces the drivers to slow down due to their limited reaction time and brake performance.

              The optimum condition for a roadway is when the cars are operating at the road's maximum possible speed and the minimum spacing allowable at that speed. This condition produces both minimum latency (which is very important in people transport) and the maximum throughput possible while not increasing latency. Add one more car and the spacing will be reduced, forcing the speed to be reduced, causing an increase in latency. This is the "people transport" definition of congestion.

              In the data trasnport field congestion also arises when conditions force latency up. The data transport might be operating at peak throughput, but there is more data to move than in can handle. Tha data is forced to wait and therefore latency goes up. This is the data transport definition of congestion. As in the people transport case, operating conditions have forced latency to increase.

              All this talk about computer driven cars comes from the need or desire to improve(reduce) reaction times and so reduce the spacing requirements for any particular speed. The alternatives, mass transport or car pooling, operate on the same principle. Notice that while I've been talking about car spacing, I've also been using the term "people transport". Moving people and their stuff is what this is all about. Putting more people, or more stuff in a vehicle also reduces the "people spacing" requirements of a road. As such it also reduces congestion and improves throughput. The same effect is produced in the data transport field by compression.

              The same effects produced by compression can be seen in both fields. Compression can improve throughput but can also have a negative effect on latency. Data must wait in a buffer to be compressed and then expanded. People must navigate to and then wait at a bus stop for the bus and then do the reverse at the other end. Depending on the situation in both the data and the people transport scenarios throughput can be improved or reduced as can latency.

              In the data transport situation, you rarely start using compression until the latency or throughput limitations become intolerable. The same thing happens in the people transport arena. Given a wide open road, good weather, and a good car, I'm driving. Given instead a traffic jam, I'll take the bus and read the paper on the way...

              • Fine, but regardless of the words you use, data transport, or water (plumbing), is vastly different from traffic. You cannot treat it like a smooth flowing liquid.
                • No where have I tried to treat it as such.

                  In that respect, your comparison of data transport and water plumbing is completely off the wall. If anything, data transport is much more closely related to roadway transport than fluid transport via plumbing.

                  All I have have done is try to explain the design principles, terminology definitions and the similarities between fields of endeavor. You might think that the principles that govern the design of roads used by a few hundred thousand drivers all doing their own thing doesn't relate at all to data trasnport design, but you will be mistaken. The models all break down when you try to delve into details of individual cars and include accidents and such, but the overall model of the road and how it works does not.

                  If a crash closes a lane, two things happen. For one, the road can now be modelled as one with one less lane. Two, the approaching drivers within visual range of the wreck can be modeled as having grossly increased reaction times.

                  The effects are right in line with the principles outlined earlier - increased congestion.

                  After passing the wreck, the drivers reaction times are reduced back to normal and the road expands by one lane and bingo - free flowing traffic in near optimal conditions.

      • Without all the speeding up and slowing down as you sift through the slow ppl, I think you would save quite a bit of gass. Get up to your optimum speed and stay there.

    • Auto Autopilots inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BeBoxer ( 14448 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @08:50PM (#4009926)
      It's my opinion that autopilot for your car is an inevitable development. It will become the only way to keep highways scaling. Adding more lanes to add capacity works to a point, but doesn't work forever. I don't think it's feasable to expect a human to navigate a twenty or thirty lane highway. And the density of traffic which an existing highway can carry is limited by the poor driving ability of humans.

      I think eventually high-capacity highways will require the use of an autopilot. Doing so would allow the cars to be run with inter-car gaps which would be suicidal with a human behind the wheel. Most stop-n-go situations are due to bad planning on the part of drivers. They speed up too much when traffic clears ahead, zoom up on the cars in front, and then have to slow down to avoid an accident. This type of driving creates waves of congestion which travel backwards down the highway, and is due entirely to poor coordination among drivers. But there is no reason that under computer control rush hour can't cruise along at 60 miles an hour with a car length or less between cars. I bet you could easily triple the maximum capacity of a highway, not to mention getting everybody to their destination faster and with better fuel economy to boot. The R&D will be expensive, but like any electrics the hardware will be practically free once developed. Compared to the cost of expanding existing freeway's, it will make sense finacially too. I figure it's maybe 10 years out.

      American's are not likely to give up their cars for any sort of public transportation, no matter how impractical cars become with rising fuel costs, increasing travel times due to congestion, increasing insurance rates, etc. Most Americans have convinced themselves that they enjoy sitting in stop and go traffic, as long as it's in a car and not a bus. But if we could figure out a way to let them keep their cars, reduce pollution, reduce accidents, let them safely talk on their cell phones, and not have to build mile-wide highways I suspect a lot of us might go for it.
      • Maybe we'll have auto pilots in 100 years, but I don't see it happening in my lifetime. Yeah, an good autopilot could let cars run closer together, under normal circumstances, but if anybody gets a flat, people are gonna die. A computer just can't spot all the road hazards a person can. It's not going to know about that cinderblock that fell off a truck, or the deer that's running into the road.
        Americans don't use public transportation, because public transportation here sucks.
        Ride a bus in Germany, then ride a bus in NY. There's a world of difference. For me to use public transportation more often, it needs to become less dirty and less dangerous. For me personally, it would also need to be going 24/7.
        One might also care to realize that things are laid out differently in America than they are in Europe. Ex: If I want to buy some milk, it would take me 40 minutes to walk to the closest place, and another 40 minutes to walk back. There is no mass transit I could take there even if I wanted to. America is BIG. I can get on the highway, drive for 3 hours and still be in the same state.
        I think cars are impractical in certain areas (NYC, Boston, etc). In most places, they are a necessity. Where I live traffic is very efficient. I'm lucky enough to live in an area when most people actually know how to drive, and near a highway big enough to handle their traffic. I love driving on it. Even during rush hour, the average speed is 70.
      • Actually, the city of Houston is working on land buyouts (read: eminent domain takeovers) for a 24-lane highway along I-10 on the west side of town. So 24-lane highways are apparently safe to drive on (god knows that area needs it.)
        • Yes we do, and if they ever finish 59, I might have an easy trip to school. And to keep it on topic, I would be the fist in line to get a car that drives itself. We have all the pieces, (power stearing / brakes, cuise control, gps, sonar/radar) we just need someone to put them together, and work out a system to plan the routs around eachother.
          • 59? Finished? What you say? haha!

            Actually they're like 3 years ahead of schedule. One of my old girlfriends lived in a house that backed up to 59 at shepherd, it should be opening there very soon. Of course, 59 south is all fucked up because of that dumbass westpark toll road, so I guess it's a moot point.
      • It's my opinion that autopilot for your car is an inevitable development. It will become the only way to keep highways scaling. Adding more lanes to add capacity works to a point, but doesn't work forever. I don't think it's feasable to expect a human to navigate a twenty or thirty lane highway. And the density of traffic which an existing highway can carry is limited by the poor driving ability of humans.

        Actually, humans are quite brilliant at driving, in spite of the idiocy you see on the road. And computers are particularly bad at things that we are good at.

        MJC.

      • Re:Auto Autopilots inevitable (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        When the autopilot program failed, it could give a new meaning to the word "crash" ... no, wait a second, that's the original meaning of "crash" ... wierd... :) Where's the meta-irony nazi when you need them. Oh, wait... I need the meta-meta ... err, uh oh... I think we need Godel now...
      • Autopilot for cars is an inevitable development, but in the way that an ice-age is inevitable. Eventually it will happen, but not any time soon. The reason is that people have a much lower tolerance for someone else's error than they have for their own.

        Aircraft are much safer than automobiles, in terms of fatalities and injuries per passenger mile. However, if anything goes wrong on a bus or a plane or a train, people get very upset. If fifteen people die in a given city in automobile accidents over (for example) the Independence Day weekend, and in another city 10 people die in a train derailment, the derailment will get a lot more press than the auto accidents.

        The reason for this is that when people are in control, we expect to make the occasional mistake, but when we put our lives in someone else's hands, we expect perfection. So when we go to an automated roadway system, there will be much less tolerance of accidents than when people are controlling their own cars.

        I predict that as population density rises in non-public-transit areas, like Dallas or Houston, we'll see a change in peoples housing preferences. Already in Dallas there is a big trend toward lofts and denser population centers as Dallas opens up its light-rail lines. I know of a couple of people who commute to work from the city center to their employment out in the suburbs by public transport, because they didn't like the perpetual traffic jams and construction delays that have sprung up as Dallas has grown. They haven't abandoned cars altogether, but they're cutting back.

        I think that's going to be a more likely scenario than automated highways. Peoples unwillingness to put their lives in the hands of a system that could create some spectacular crashes, given the right software glitch, will prevent this coming to pass until there's a dramatic need.
    • Just to expand on your thought a bit, this would also be good for people who had disabilities and were unable to drive at all.
    • All I want right now is something that will maintain a safe distance from the car in front when I am on cruise control on the freeway. I dont mind steering and changing lanes, but I hate having to brake, which disengages the c/c, and then resume, or reset the c/c.

      So if I am approaching a slower vehicle in front of me, the cruise control will automatically adjust to slow down to maintain distance, but will also automatically accelerate if the space ahead clears, back to the original speed setting.
      • YES! The automatic tail gator. Set the c/c to 85, and when that slow guy (doing just over the speed limit) doesn't move, your car will hold pace 5 feet from him. It's responce time will even be quick enogh to slow you down when they slam on the brakes or down shift. This is every speeders dream!
      • The newest full-size Mercedes S600 sedan does just this with Doppler radar. It can adjust its speed within any bounds to the car in front of it and can control both brakes and accelerator.

        Of course, it also has a V12 and costs $115K, but hey, at least the technology is there.

        Mercedes USA S600 website [mbusa.com]

        A click on the Features > Feature Spotlight > Distronic will give you a video overview of the functionality.
      • Cruise control is obsolete. There isn't a five mile stretch of pavement east of the Mississippi or along the West coast that allows a driver to employ his c/c during any daylight hours or early night time.

        A cruise control package on a car is like that range of channels on your cable dial that is dedicated to public access. Useless but there. You might as well drive with your hazard lights, rear window defogger, and seat warmers on full time where you otherwise would use c/c.

        Now, if we could get the engineers in Detroit to install sharp gouging implements in hub caps, we could make good time!

    • The people at the Universität der Bundeswehr München / ISF [unibw-muenchen.de] (U. of German Armed Forces) are much further than that. Their Autonomous Vehicle already took a 1000 mile drive across German Autobahns, where only the initiation of lane changes was done by a human (according to an article in c't issue 5/2000).
    • better then that, several trucking companies have working prototyps of trucks that are full automated, without a magstrip.

      there cool to watch, espcially the ones with no steering wheel.
  • Here is my entry [scientificsonline.com]. =)

  • At first glance.. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sweetums ( 266193 )
    You might get the impression this is about NASCAR size cars... still interesting when you realize that 9fps is coming from a single NiCad in Tyco size vehicles.

    Just to clarify for those who made the same initial assumption I did.

  • Personally, I'd rather have RC helicopters. Yes, I know their batteries wouldn't last long... but in an office environment, tiny cars aren't going to get very far, given the amount of clutter which would obstruct them. Helicopters, on the other hand, could fly over cubicle walls to attack people...

  • Wowzers! (Score:3, Funny)

    by cascino ( 454769 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @07:49PM (#4009790) Homepage
    Linking to a video file from the frontpage of /.?
    Wowzers! Methinks flaming shards of this server will be moving - autonomously - at 9 ft/sec very shortly...
    [/bad joke]
    • That's what I thought at first too, but I didn't have too much trouble. And I must say that that video was quite impressive. Too bad we couldn't see what happened close to the end when they all got excited.
      • Too bad we couldn't see what happened close to the end when they all got excited.

        The reason for all the screams at the end was that the zig zags in the course had cause the car to oscillate over the track, and it was able to hold on long enough to make the turn. -- i.e. it was a close call on the last turn.
  • The annual Mobot [cmu.edu] competition at Carnegie Mellon seems a lot like this except the robots need to be able to stay on course that also has downhill slopes along it.

    My tank from the 1998 competition woulda worked fine except for endianess problems between my roommates and I.

  • Nice, but what about the Army's ALV project? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by AsOldAsFortran ( 565087 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @07:57PM (#4009804)
    In the 1980's President Reagan had the Star Wars project, which everyone has heard about, but there was also $600M in funding for other projects including the autonomous land vehicle (ALV). A number of schools worked on this, but the most successful was CMU with a number of robot vehicles that could go up to 60 mph and drive on uncontrolled roads - one drove cross country in a demo. ALVINN was one name used for this system. As a result of Sept. 11th there is renewed US research funding for this area. Autonomous flying vehicles, like the Predator in Afganistan, also came in part out of the 1980s funding from DARPA - we just haven't seen the similar successful application of the land version.

    The key to this particular competition seems to be the size and weight limits on the cars. This is a contest for little RC-style cars. The technology exists to go much faster, but not in this form factor.

  • Remember the Man v. Machine [slashdot.org] company from a couple years ago? They were proposing to race in F1 cars.

    Surprise surprise, the site [man-v-machine.com] is dead now...

  • It look like they have bolted a whole lot of equiptment to an average RC car chassis.

    It would be interesting to take one those cars (with the electronics still on for weight fairness etc), install some RC gear, and see who's faster.

    I suspect that the human would still be the better driver/faster at the moment. Also, a human driver can navigate traffic. These guys look like they might have a hard time in a race with other cars ;)

  • this might give me the skills to leave the B-mains and hit the A-mains. Assuming they let me tape their ozite carpet. :p
  • It is a good thing that speed, accuracy and conserving energy are the main products sought of this competition although it would really be fun to watch these cars in motion in real life.

    I vote for sponsored demonstrations of these products at Motor Racing events. Normal RC Racing always attracts a very large crowd at any event I have been too! =)
  • We have autonomous internet access, autonomous electronic mail, and autonomous peer to peer file transfers. There's no evidence that this autonymity has been used for anything other than criminal activity. I can only imagine for what sort of nefarious purposes autonomous race cars would be used.
  • I've always said that a robot could kick the SHIT out of a human at nascar. After all, how complex is 10: GO FAST 20: TURN LEFT? I bet that in five years, we'll have robots (read a bungee cord and a brick) trouncing humans at nascar. Naturally, it'll probably take the application of the AI in Gran Tourismo (ever see that asshole wreck? NO) to get robot cars to do Real Racing (grand touring, gran prix and rally). I say we leave the nas/indy car crap to the machines and go outside and play.
    • I bet that in five years, we'll have robots (read a bungee cord and a brick) trouncing humans at nascar.
      I'll take a piece of that action. And why wait five years? Bricks and bungee cords are available now.

    • Uh. This is a comment coming from someone who obviously hasn't done much programming. You want to design the system that accounts for real life racing circumstances? Coincidently, I'm watching Driven right now, a very bad movie. But it happens to drill the point into my mind that racing is nothing short of chaos. You argue that game AI is sufficient to use in real life. You're basically saying that the AI can deal in a chaos environment. However, the computer generates the chaos. It knows what each car is doing and is planning on doing. Each car object in the game is interwoven with the other objects. Real life is not this way. You can't predict what the other cars are doing. Try designing code to react to such a complex environment in which people can easily die if things don't work *perfectly*.
      • it would be easier to crated one for nascar then for 'civilian' use. there are far more variable in everyday use then at NASCAR.

        You can write a program to 'predict' what other cars are going to do just as well as a human can. the trick is to get the right response quick enough to use those 'predictions'.
        NASCAR driver do things for very specific reasons.

        note: I said easier, not easy.

        I would wager, that if there was a "robotic NASCAR" it would only be a few years before the AIs could outperform there human counter parts.

        Plus it would be cool to see how the cars start to change when there is no human driver in one.

  • Every day in Boston... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Alien Being ( 18488 ) on Sunday August 04, 2002 @08:57PM (#4009944)
    The streets are jam-packed with thousands of vehicles travelling in irregular serpentine patterns.

    None of these machines (except mine, of course) contain any type of human intelligence, but it's interesting to watch the AI at work. At night the roads look like Conway's Game of Life running on a computer with bad RAM.

    Expert systems allow some vehicles to negotiate left turns from right lanes and to outbrake school busses when entering a rotary.

    Fuzzy logic is essential for speed control, stop lights, parking and many other mission-critical tasks.

    Genetic algorithms tend to select the maneuvers which are least expected by other vehicles.

    Task scheduling is done according to driver convenience. For example, turn signals are always lower priority than dialing a call on the mobile phone.

    Most communications between vehicles is a crude form of "digital" communication.

    Unfortunately, most of the vehicles are Windows-based which results in a high rate of crashes. Mack trucks seem to be better than average.

  • I just watched the video of the winning car and it's just not what I'd hoped for. All these cars are doing is following a line/wire.
    I was just hoping that these cars were actually using sensors to keep track of the distance to the sidewalls of the track and the next turn.
    It would be a good M. Eng. project for somebody to do this, using a half dozen laser distance sensors on the front, so that the car could go fast on straighaways, slow down for turns, and avoid sidewalls.
    Does anyone know of a project like this?
    With a good onboard computer, the car could build a model of the track as it went around, and calculate the optimal path & speeds to use on all subsequent laps. Using lasers or ultra sonic distance sensors would let the robot know when a turn was going to happen a lot sooner the the few inches of warning it gets in their setup. If you put an accelerometer in the car, you could even have it self-calibrate, discovering it's own acceleration curve, maximum lateral acceleration, and braking. It could then use those values to find the perfect path through the track on the second lap.
    • With a good onboard computer, the car could build a model of the track as it went around, and calculate the optimal path & speeds to use on all subsequent laps. Using lasers or ultra sonic distance sensors would let the robot know when a turn was going to happen a lot sooner the the few inches of warning it gets in their setup. If you put an accelerometer in the car, you could even have it self-calibrate, discovering it's own acceleration curve, maximum lateral acceleration, and braking. It could then use those values to find the perfect path through the track on the second lap.

      Yes, it sounds like a good idea, and in fact that was the original plan for the winning car. But it sounds a lot easier than it is. First of all, time constraint wise - these cars are built from scratch, and tuned to perform well in under fifteen weeks. (Yes, that includes all the sensor circuits, and power supply electronics) Secondly, there is a major problem with wheel slippage - if your wheels slip, you don't know where you are anymore.

      A entry from 2001 went slow around the track the first time to memorize it, and then used that information on the second round in order to predict turns and change speed. It used the track crossing location to resync where it thought it was on the track. But if you look at the track layout, there are large section with no track crossing. i.e. wheel slippage - knowing where you actually are - is the main problem to be solved for memorization type approaches.

      You can't see it in the video, but the winning 2002 car does detect and speed up (slightly) on straight aways.
      • Yeah, I agree that there is no way to do with I was talking about in 14 weeks. My idea would take a few grad students a year, doing nothing else.
        Did anybody try unsing accelerometers?
        An optimal design would have (almost) no wheel slippage.
        Maybe something like a feedback circuit, where it never allows itself to pull more than .?? g's
        I think the memorization approach just doesn't work unless you have a ceratin amount of instrumentation.
        When I was really young my dad, brought home this robot that had ultrasonic distance sensors and used stepper motors to move itself. It looked a lot like R2D2. It tried to map it's environment, but wheel slippage caused it to suck horribly.
        I think any design that would do successful mapping would have to use several sensors for speed data. If someone wanted to go all out (choosing this as their life's quest), they could monitor each tire's rotation individually, use an optcal sensor on the bottom or the vehicle (like an optical mouse), use an accelerometer, and use the data from laser range finders.
      • Congrats on the winning car!
  • I hope I miscalculated this, but I figured 9ft/s is around 6mph. 9ft/1s:1mi/5280ft:3600s/1hr For those of you in modern nations, I apologize for the Imperial units. However; I am a speed-crazed American and albeit autonomous, if it can't go 45mph, I'm not impressed...

    On a more serious note: Is the direction finding logic so intense that a greater speed can't be safely achieved?
    • Retraction: Didn't realize we were talking about 1/10 size models. In that case, 9ft/s is fairly impressive.

      On the other hand, how about porting this project/competition to full size cars? Obviously there is a funding issue, but we could Interest a broader audience who, in turn, may be willing to provide grant money?
    • On a more serious note: Is the direction finding logic so intense that a greater speed can't be safely achieved?

      Short answer: It's not the intensity of the logic, it's reaction time.

      Long answer: There are several limitation on direction finding -
      The CPU board used on the winning car only runs at 40Mhz, so updates to steering can not be done any faster than 40Mhz/loop length.
      The servo - a generic RC servo will only take updates every 20ms = 50 Hz. (You can cheat this down to as low as 10ms, but that's still only 100Hz)
      In the seen configuration, the sensors only 'see' a couple inches in front of the wheel, so reaction time becomes critical at higher speeds.

      With a memorization approach, you could easily increase the speed, but there are other problems with memorization.
    • Feets per second? Why not use Furlongs-per-fortnight as a more fun and confusing speed measure?

      But anyway, 6mph is quite shabby. It's okay for an autonomous robot, but the point was to build and autonomous race car, no? Part of the challenge should be to build the controller for the car so that it can cope with high speeds, while guilding the vehicle around the track and (presumably) avoiding the other cars. For a decent platform, they can head to the local hobby shop and pick up any 1/10th scale gas-powered model car, these will do a lot better than 6mph.

      Besides, at 6mph these races will hardly be exiting to watch!
    • The track is 300'. A typical NASCAR track is maybe 2miles ~= 10500', or 35 times as long.

      So the litte robot cars going around the track at 6mph would be like real race car going 210mph.

      Not so bad for a coupla undergrads, huh?

  • I helped my roommate out on this project. The cars roll around the track following sensors. I helped him design some of the stuff. It can be difficult since the car has to interpret the signal into steering and speed control. I wish that UCLA had a specific class for this competition because other schools get the leg up on us because of this.
  • heise reports here [heise.de] (in german) that DARPA will publish information about their own competition tomorrow, called Grand Challenge.

    according to the article, it will be held in 2004, going all the way from LA to Las Vegas. it will be for autonomous robots, no human help allowed.
    the winner will get 1 mio $, so get working.

    they are quoting US media in the article, so there should be some infos in english somewhere.

  • Strap yourself in son and prepare yourself for Mach 0.008!
  • The toy industry has had these cars on the market for years. You just put the track together, preselect the speed with a piece of duct tape on the trigger, and bam, autonomous race cars! At least until your cat steps on the track...

  • Why don't they just go their newsagent? (Score:3, Informative)

    by MrCreosote ( 34188 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @12:01AM (#4010422)
    My son is building one of these. He gets the parts from a magazine [realrobots.com] subscription. Light following/repulsion, sonar detection, line following. And seems to go pretty fast to boot.

  • Not very impressive (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @12:07AM (#4010437) Homepage
    The rules are restrictive, and the cars aren't very good. National Semiconductor makes you build your own speed controller, which is hard. (R/C car motor controllers can switch 100A with 1 ounce of electronics. You try doing that.) And then they encourage people to use 555 timers to sense the signals. This thing seems to be a promotion for National Semi linear parts.

    The winner was a constant-speed car. At 6MPH. Cars aren't learning the track and then driving it at a good speed; they're just dumb line-followers.

    Battlebots are much cooler.

    • The rules are restrictive, and the cars aren't very good. National Semiconductor makes you build your own speed controller, which is hard. (R/C car motor controllers can switch 100A with 1 ounce of electronics. You try doing that.)

      Oh no, learning. Seriously though, this is a competition aimed at electrical engineering college students, half the point is to learn how things like this really work. Someone has to build those commercial components.

      The winner was a constant-speed car. At 6MPH. Cars aren't learning the track and then driving it at a good speed; they're just dumb line-followers.

      Not quiet - see this [slashdot.org] post for more info.
      • The performance of R/C car speed controls is awesome. Current specs of a good unit: [teamnovak.com]
        • On-resistance, 0.00058 ohm.
        • Rated current: 640A.
        • Dimensions: 1.37in x 1.11in x 0.66in

        You just can't kludge up something like that in a few weeks. Anybody who's done power electronics looks at those numbers in awe. Plus they come with features like total self-protection against dead short, overheating, reverse polarity, etc. And all for about $100. Industrial motor controllers with comparable ratings cost thousands and are huge.

    • Re:Not very impressive (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I also participated in the NATCAR competition, and as Octothorp said, part of the experience was the learning, of learning how to do speed control, power circuitry, etc.

      All the Berkeley cars used a microcontroller for timing (Infineon chips, not National Semi), and many of our teams' sensors were simple RLC circuits, not National Semi. Sure we used National Semi for sensor amps and parts of the power circuitry, but even then many of their chips were eschewed in favor of better chips. In my team's case (and for many other teams) we used Linear Technologies and Maxim parts because we found the NatSemi chips insufficient. If NatSemi was trying to push their parts, they didn't succeed too well.

      My team attempted a learning algorithm, but given the time frames (15 weeks from chassis to competition, 5 minutes total on competition track with messups included) and various last minute disasters, we couldn't perfect it in time for the competition. I know of at least 2 other teams who also tried to memorize to increase time. Also in the case of teams from other schools, they built completely analog cars (PID controllers in hardware *shudder*), with obviously no memorization possible. Even without memorization, it's more than just dumb line following. You can try to tweak the line following to shave off 10ths of a second here and there, but you still have the challenge to remain stable when the track suddenly changes course. Also, sorting out confusing magnetic fields at track crossings is a challenge all its own.

      6MPH, at 1/10 scale, is the equivalent of 60MPH. Try getting a full sized car to follow tracks at that speed on its own, without overshooting more than 15 feet away from the track even on sharp turns. It truely is a challenge.
      • I race 1/10 hobby quality RC cars. Yeah, Yeah, 6mph is like 60 scale mph. But is is slow as piss compared to what my cars do. And others that are similar. Depending on the tracks I run my cars at any wheres from 25mph to over 60 mph for the longest straights on the track. Yes. 60+mph, not scale. (I love asphalt tracks!!!)

        At one point in time I tried experimenting by mounting a wireless X-10 cam on the car and tried driving it from my computer. The cars just go too fast to control it that way. But, I see no reason why if you had all the appropriate information available in sensors that you couldn't program the vehicle to outperform even the best human driver.
  • ... why, that's almost sixteen and a half kilofurlongs per fortnight!

  • Disappointing (Score:2, Insightful)

    by the bluebrain ( 443451 )
    I was expecting all sorts of bits coming together in this article, such as image/video processing, adding several images together, object recognition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as applied to video images (if it's blurred, you probably can't recognise what it is - but then, it's probably moving fast, so precise identicication takes a lower precedence than getting out of the way), attempts to put all gathered data into perspective, i.e., making a "map" of the outside world, and so on.

    What do I get? Hey! I remember thses things from the eighties. You got a little bug with a couple of light sensors underneath, plus a red pen. You also got a thrashing when you covered the most available big flat white surface, which was the kitchen table, with roads (a.k.a. "scribbling").

    OK, so they've gotten faster, but it looks like any car you upgrade with this tech will race down the centre marker of any highway you let it loose on ... which might actually be an improvement on some people's driving, come to think of it.
  • 9 ft/s, eh? Can we have that in furlongs per fortnight please? I am so much more accustomed to the unit.

    For the metrically non-challenged:
    9ft/s = 2,7432 meter/s
    thats = 9,87 km/h or 6,13 miles/h

    And for collectors of odd figures and measurements: that speed equals 7769 nautical miles per presidential term.
    • For the metrically non-challenged:
      9ft/s = 2,7432 meter/s
      thats = 9,87 km/h or 6,13 miles/h

      Curious (and, possibly, ignorant). Are the commnas typing errors or does your country use commas instead of periods for decimal points? One needs to know these things before furlongs of any sort can be calculated.

      MadDad32

      What is the opposite of 'defunct'? (QuantSuff?)
      • The comma is used in Germany (all of Europe?) as a decimal separator... pi would be 3,141...

        The point is used as a thousand separator, as in 3.500.000 citizens.

  • You can play at home (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    CogniToy has a game that simulates the programming of these robots. They have a small web based demo Here [cognitoy.com] If you go to their main page you can get more details on the full game [mindrover.com]

  • McLaren F1 Did this in the early 90's? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I believe McLaren F1 did this in the early 90's- with a full scale F1 car- not lapping at race pace, but allegedly, lapping.

  • A few years ago when F1 had every driver aid under the sun there was a rumour, urban legend?, circulating that Mclaren had a car that was lapping Silverstone with out a driver.

    I was hoping we would see the first car to win a GP without a human. Looks like Schumacher has achieved that now.
  • Myself and too other guys did this as our Sr project for electrical engineering. It is more complicated than it sounds. We buildt six EM sensors. I built a motor control system to maximise power delivery. There was a 16 bit microcontroller board from P&E Micro, and a serial grafical LCD from Scott Edwards (thanks guys). We had a GUI running on the microcontrtoller so we could change settings and see what the sensors saw. My partners fabed an analog ASIC. Took two simesters.
  • Listen you arrogant,stuck up, whiney bastards.
    The site is in imperial measurements.
    What is timothy supposed to do, tell them to change there measurement type, then post the story?

  • last post!

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