Brains, Bots and Bodies

SciVestor took a tour of the Robotics Pavilion at National Instruments’ NI Week 2008.  Anu Saha, NI marketing manager discusses academic and corporate partnerships that feature LabView and CompactRIO technologies.

SciVestor Executive Director Jonas Lamis narrates the Autonomous Vehicle Roadmap that was presented at RoboBusiness 2008. This presentation is based in part on Robot Central’s observations, research, and opinions of emergent technologies from the DARPA Grand Challenge series of competitions. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian [...]

New free research presentation available from SciVestor. You can download it here.
This presentation is being presented at RoboBusiness 2008. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian autonomous vehicles. We discuss a plausible technology driven autonomous vehicle roadmap from 2010 - 2030. The presentation highlights several emerging technology vendors [...]

In what seems to be a recurring theme among DARPA Urban Challengers, these guys have greater ambitions than winning the race. “The goal was to be a strong performer, not necessarily win,” Chris Yakes, Director of the Advanced Products Group for Oshkosh, said.
Yakes explained that his team is developing an autonomous system in kit [...]

Tartan Racing’s “Boss” of Pittsburgh, Penn. turned in the top performance in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge and won the $2 million cash prize as the competition’s first-place winner, DARPA announced today. Stanford Racing’s “Junior” of Stanford, Calif., won the $1 million second place prize, while Victor Tango’s “Odin” of [...]

The competition is not quite over; however, three of the final six teams have met their mission objectives already. Who ranks 1st, 2nd, and 3rd is still to be determined as judges calculate each of the robot’s penalties and running times. Considering the substantial margin and relatively low number of penalties [...]

I doubt the insurance company is going to cover this collision.
At 12:35 PM local time Cornell’s robot, Skynet, stopped itself in front of MIT’s robot.  Skynet stayed there long enough that MIT’s robot made an executive decision to pass.  It successfully passed Skynet’s DARPA chase vehicle.  As MIT approached  Skynet, it made another executive decision [...]

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about all sorts of technologies and programming algorithms. I took a minute to break out of that mode to absorb the ambiance here today. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced including the 2005 Grand Challenge tent. The ‘05 tent was mostly occupied by [...]

A spectator favorite, Team Oshkosh’s Terra Max literally almost took out a building. At this point, it’s unclear what went wrong. There was aerial video footage that showed Terra Max butted up against a brick pillar. I don’t know if there was contact.
Annie Way placed itself in pause mode and DARPA made [...]

This morning’s launch was relatively smooth. Intelligent Vehicle Systems had some trouble when it saw a k-rail and paused itself for too long. DARPA allowed the team to reset and reposition itself for a relaunch. Their relaunch was successful and they’re doing well now. As a matter of fact, as [...]