Sensing, Navigation and Reasoning Technologies for the DARPA Urban Challenge

Abstract

This report describes Team Caltech's technical approach and results for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Our primary technical thrusts were in three areas: (1) mission and contingency management for autonomous systems; (2) distributed sensor fusion, mapping and situational awareness; and (3) optimization-based guidance, navigation and control. Our autonomous vehicle, Alice, demonstrated new capabilities in each of these areas and drove approximate 300 autonomous miles in preparation for the race. The vehicle completed 2 of the 3 qualification tests, but did not ultimately qualify for the race due to poor performance in the merging tests at the National Qualifying Event.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 31, 2007
Accession Number
ADA475619

Entities

People

  • Andrew J. Howard
  • Christian Looman
  • Jeremy Ma
  • Joel W. Burdick
  • Noel Du Toit
  • Richard M. Murray
  • Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn

Organizations

  • California Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Sensors
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Collision Avoidance
  • Communications Protocols
  • Computer Communications
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Control Systems
  • Coordinate Systems
  • Debugging
  • Detection
  • Estimators
  • Geometry
  • Jet Propulsion
  • Motion Planning
  • Navigation
  • Range Finders
  • Sensor Fusion

Readers

  • Geospatial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Analytics
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Software Engineering

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - Autonomous System Control