175 Miles Through the Desert
The DARPA Grand Challenge is one of the biggest open challenges for the robotics community to date. It requires a robotic vehicle to follow a given route of up to 175 miles across punishing desert terrain, without any human supervision. The Challenge was first held in 2004, in which the best performing team failed after 7.3 miles of autonomous driving. The speaker heads one out of 195 teams worldwide competing for the 2 Million Dollar price. Thrun will present the work of the Stanford Racing Team, which is developing an automated car capable of desert driving at up to 50km/h. He will report on research in areas as diverse as computer vision, control, fault-tolerant systems, machine learning, motion planning, data fusion, and 3-D environment modeling.