Robotics Technology Center

Unmanned, Self-Driving Car Wins the Ultimate DARPA’s Urban Challenge

A number of weird-looking race cars were wheel-screeching between road obstacles at the 2007 DARPA's Grand Challenge. These cars were represented by different private sectors across the country which had the enthusiasm to develop advanced autonomous vehicles. The competition was primarily drawn from the United States Congress' mandate "that a third of U.S. military ground vehicles be unmanned by 2015."

The challengers were mounted with laser sensor, moving cameras, automatic gear shift systems and most importantly, the central processor, which mainly controls the autonomous vehicles. Boss, is one that is made with regular chassis and embodied in the Chevrolet Tahoe SUV model.

Several electric motors which are centrally controlled by the computer, actuated the brake pedal, gear selector, and steering column and through controller area network (CAN) bus communication with the engine control module. Despite these especialized technical modification, Boss maintains its standard human driving controls, and pressing a button reverts it to a human-driven vehicle.

Boss was built with combined 17 different sensors (a mixture of light detection and ranging [lidar], radio detection and ranging [radar], and global positioning system [GPS]). These sensors are mounted to provide a full 360 degree field of view around the vehicle. No wonder, Boss went home the winner.

Watch the video here.

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