The U.S. military has selected a team of Princeton undergraduates to
compete in the final round of a $2 million contest to engineer a
self-driving vehicle that can negotiate 150 miles of rugged desert
terrain.
The student team was chosen for the international contest after a week
of intensive trials in Fontana, Calif., during which 23 top teams were
culled from 43 semifinalists. The final event will take place Saturday,
Oct. 8, in the desert of Primm, Nev. Updates on the contest, including
a blog from the Princeton students, are available through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is sponsoring the contest.
The team, which worked with a minimal budget and salvaged GMC pickup
truck, started as one of 195 entrants and passed through several visits
and reviews by DARPA officials to make it to the semifinals, which
concluded Wednesday, Oct. 5.
"It's phenomenal," said team member Bryan Cattle, a junior. "We're
still just amazed that we made it this far. But it's funny: The thing
that kept us going through the all-nighters, the nights out in the snow
in the parking lot, was that we never really doubted for a day that
that we'd make the finals and that we might bring home the $2 million.
Yet part of me says this is just unbelievable."
The competition, known as the DARPA Grand Challenge, began in 2004 when
the military agency challenged professional engineers, students and
hobbyists to design a vehicle that could drive through the desert with
no human intervention. No one won the original contest, which carried a
$1 million prize. DARPA then doubled the prize. It will go to the team
whose vehicle completes a 150-mile course in the shortest time under 10
hours, while avoiding various man-made obstacles and natural hazards.
The students, who were advised by Alain Kornhauser, professor of
operations research and financial engineering, did nearly all the
design work, programming and building themselves. "We have by far the
least budget and by far the most simplistic approach -- not simplistic,
but you might say elegant," said Cattle. "We brought what we had and
made it work."
In the qualifying events during the last week, the students' vehicle --
dubbed Prospect 11 -- ran flawlessly through several two-mile runs,
neatly avoiding piles of tires and parked cars. It also had some
failures, including one run in which it smashed into a parked vehicle
because of an error in the global positioning system. After a few
corrections and lessons learned, the students said they are not making
any major changes before the final event Saturday.
"It works so well there is no reason to fool with it," said Anand Atreya, a junior.
In addition to Cattle and Atreya, the team members on the trip are
sophomores Gordon Franken, Brendan Collins, Andrew Saxe and Joshua
Herbach, and seniors Scott Schiffres, Kamil Choudhury and Rachel Blaire.
Regardless of the final results, Atreya said the group feels that it
already has accomplished and learned an enormous amount. "We feel
great," he said. "The fact that we have made a car that drives itself
is amazing, and now we're going to the finals. It's something that none
of us have ever done before."
