It could’ve happened to anyone. Just as the Land Rover began passing a Chevy Tahoe that had stopped at the entrance to a traffic circle, the Tahoe started moving. The resulting collision was ruled “no fault.” But it was also “no driver”: it occurred in the finals of the Urban Challenge robotic-car race on November 3 in Victorville, CA, supplying one of the event’s biggest thrills. The automated Land Rover, known as Talos, was MIT’s first faculty-student entry in a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Challenge race. Talos took the fender bender with Cornell’s vehicle in stride and went on to a respectable fourth-place finish behind vehicles designed by veteran teams from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Virginia Tech.
The initial DARPA Grand Challenge races, held in 2004 and 2005, tested robotic cars mainly on lonely desert roads. In a testament to the advances in robotics in the past three years, DARPA staged the Urban Challenge on an abandoned military base to assess how well driverless cars could navigate through a mock city while obeying traffic laws and interacting safely with other bots and human drivers.
To enable Talos to drive on its own, the MIT team outfitted it with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, bolting on laser range finders, GPS hardware, and video cameras to capture information about the vehicle’s surroundings. To crunch all that data, the researchers installed a miniature supercomputer with 40 cores, stowing it behind the back seats. They also added an extra generator to keep the hardware up and running and a second air conditioner to cool the computers.
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