The Golem Group's DARPA Vehicles: from left,
Golem 1 and Golem 2.
Vehicles That Drive Themselves? UCLA Engineering Pushes
Autonomous Control to the Limit
2005 DARPA Grand Challenge Contenders
Get Their Start on TV's “Jeopardy”
What is the DARPA Grand Challenge? A
group of vehicles traveling under their own steam will cross the
desert on Saturday, October 8, in a high-stakes government race
worth $2 million. Among them will be the team from the UCLA Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science – a talented
group that started out with a desire to win and a jackpot garnered
by one of its members on the hit TV game show “Jeopardy.”
Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA, the Grand Challenge was conceived last year
to encourage the development of unmanned vehicles for combat.
Held in the desert Southwest, the team that develops an autonomous
ground vehicle that finishes the designated route the quickest
within 10 hours wins. The initial prize money, doubled after none
of the 15 contestants in last year’s race were able to complete
the difficult course, is a nice incentive, but for UCLA it’s
not the central one.
“It’s really about the challenge of
building a machine that can essentially drive on its own more
than it is about the money,” says Jason Meltzer, one of
the returning members of the group whose college quiz bowl colleague
Richard Mason sank his $30,000 Jeopardy winnings into outfitting
the group’s first car. “The race is a strategy game.
It takes knowledge, a lot of preparation, timing and luck. In
this case, it’s a team effort.”
This year’s DARPA team is a consortium of
The Golem Group – the company Mason co-founded with teammate
Jim Radford – and UCLA, and includes faculty and graduates
from computer science, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering,
among them UCLA Vision Lab director Stefano Soatto and mechanical
engineering professor Emilio Frazzoli.
Eagle Jones, another returning graduate student
from last year who has spent considerable time and effort on the
project, says the group is well positioned for the second race,
particularly because they come from diverse engineering, scientific,
and cultural backgrounds, all of which adds new perspectives on
problems that a more concentrated team might miss.
“Our new vehicle is particularly well done.
The hardware and integration is well planned and executed. Our
software has been developed far beyond last year. A large number
of sensors are integrated into the vehicle, including a vision
system from MobilEye that finds off-road paths,” he explains.
The team is hoping that all of these improvements
will spell success. Last year’s unmanned vehicle traveled
5.2 miles, and was one of the best performers in the field despite
a fatal problem with a throttle replaced just before the race.
For their second attempt, they have designed and
equipped two vehicles simultaneously – one as a contender
and one as a back up. The vehicles cannot be controlled remotely
and must rely on global positioning, various sensors, lasers,
radar and vision systems, or cameras, to orient themselves and
detect and avoid randomly placed obstacles. The exact course is
kept a highly guarded secret until just two hours before the actual
race time.
As for the vehicle, “Everything is improved
this year,” says Meltzer. “There is not one system
that remains unchanged since last year’s race. There can’t
be a single focus in a project like this, since there is far too
much to do. So we’ve split our efforts into a number of
areas: control, planning, sensing, and hardware. Each of these
have advanced tremendously in the past year.”
Nearly 200 participants from across the US and
Canada and several foreign countries applied for the Grand Challenge
this year, a much higher number than previously. The contenders
were whittled down in various challenge races to the final group.
If no one wins the second endeavor, the prize money will be doubled
to $4 million dollars. But if one of the vehicles does successfully
cross the finish line, it’s unlikely the race will be held
again next year.
Regardless, the team agrees there isn’t
another “Jeopardy” appearance in their future now
that the car has substantial funding based on its strong performance
last year. But, Meltzer laughs, “Who knows? They’re
all brilliant guys.”
For more information on UCLA’s
Golem Group, visit http://www.golemgroup.com,
or to find further information about UCLA’s vision lab,
go to http://www.vision.cs.ucla.edu/.
For more information on the DARPA
Grand Challenge, visit http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/.
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09.30.05
-Melissa Abraham
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