Google’s Driverless Cars and the Future of Human Driving

Self-driving cars have been an appealing futuristic goal since before KITT on Knight Rider. The United States Department of Defense created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to promote the development of self-driving cars. Congress has allowed DARPA to host a grand challenge competition and award cash prizes for autonomous vehicles that could drive a 150-mile route through the Mojave Desert. Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google Street View, developed the robotic vehicle with his team in Stanford that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Thrun formerly led the Google X Project that has transformed their autonomous prototype into Google’s self-diving car today. This post was originally published on the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal website on April 26, 2016. The original post can be accessed via the Archived Link button above

How to teach a van to drive: an undergraduate perspective on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge

This paper describes how a team of undergraduate volunteers from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) developed a robotic vehicle that can navigate completely autonomously through the Mojave Desert. Called Alice, the vehicle was Caltech's entry to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge which aimed to generate the technology needed to build and program an unmanned ground vehicle through 130 miles of difficult terrain completely autonomously in under ten hours. Although Alice failed to win the competition, she did succeed in her original purpose of teaching a new generation of students about engineering, how to apply theory to the real world, how to debug and deal with shortcomings and schedules, and most importantly, how to work as a team on a complex problem

A new approach to teaching feedback

The Control and Dynamical Systems (CDS) Department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has revised its entry-level curriculum in dynamics, feedback, and control with the goals of updating the subject matter to include modern tools and making control tools accessible to a nontraditional audience. One of the approaches made was to divide the introductory control theory class into two tracks, with a conceptual track geared toward students who need only a conceptual overview of control tools and an analytical track providing a more detailed mathematical treatment of feedback. The conceptual track, CDS 101, which is mainly discussed in the paper, is intended for advanced students in science and engineering who can benefit from an overview of control techniques but who might not have the need for the mathematical depth underlying the material. Special attention is paid to ensuring that the course is accessible to students from biological, physical, and information sciences, using examples from these domains to illustrate concepts. The goal of the course is to enable students to use the principles and tools of feedback in their research activities

Time Critical Social Mobilization: The DARPA Network Challenge Winning Strategy

It is now commonplace to see the Web as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy and scale. To push this idea to its limit, DARPA launched its Network Challenge, which aimed to "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems." The challenge required teams to provide coordinates of ten red weather balloons placed at different locations in the continental United States. This large-scale mobilization required the ability to spread information about the tasks widely and quickly, and to incentivize individuals to act. We report on the winning team's strategy, which utilized a novel recursive incentive mechanism to find all balloons in under nine hours. We analyze the theoretical properties of the mechanism, and present data about its performance in the challenge.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure

F1/10: An Open-Source Autonomous Cyber-Physical Platform

In 2005 DARPA labeled the realization of viable autonomous vehicles (AVs) a grand challenge; a short time later the idea became a moonshot that could change the automotive industry. Today, the question of safety stands between reality and solved. Given the right platform the CPS community is poised to offer unique insights. However, testing the limits of safety and performance on real vehicles is costly and hazardous. The use of such vehicles is also outside the reach of most researchers and students. In this paper, we present F1/10: an open-source, affordable, and high-performance 1/10 scale autonomous vehicle testbed. The F1/10 testbed carries a full suite of sensors, perception, planning, control, and networking software stacks that are similar to full scale solutions. We demonstrate key examples of the research enabled by the F1/10 testbed, and how the platform can be used to augment research and education in autonomous systems, making autonomy more accessible

Technology Prizes for Climate Change Mitigation

We analyze whether technology inducement prizes could be a useful complement to standard research grants and contracts in developing climate change mitigation technologies. We find that there are important conceptual advantages to using inducement prizes in certain circumstances. These conceptual inferences are borne out by an examination of the track record of prizes inducing research into public goods, including relevant energy technologies. However, we also find that the prizes’ successes are contingent on their proper design. We analyze how several important design elements could influence the effectiveness of a climate technology prize.inducement prize, research and development, climate change, technology, policy

Dynamic walking with Dribbel

This paper describes the design and construction of Dribbel, a passivity-based walking robot. Dribbel has been designed and built at the Control Engineering group of the University of Twente. This paper focuses on the practical side: the design approach, construction, electronics, and software design. After a short introduction of dynamic walking, the design process, starting with simulation, is discussed