VXer
I know of a maroon Mercury that ALMOST negotiated it's way around a car and a bus and through on-coming Southbound traffic to make a U-turn into Northbound traffic and INTO MY PATH! Perhaps you could brain-tap the driver and put his skill to use. Let me know if I need to collect the head. Sorry, just a little bitter...deep breath...
velvis
thankyouthankyouverymuch
'Zoid
Yeah, human drivers can be dangerous... maybe someday robots will do a better job.
But for now, you know what they say "To err is human....to really foul things up requires a computer."
Administrator
Very cool!!! Glad this place and all of it's connections can be of help..
Keep up the dream!!
Scott / moncha.com
'Zoid
We are one of 89 teams competing in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. We are partnering with the Computer Science department at The University of Texas (Robotics/Artificial Intelligence). Checkout a recent picture of our VX with the Texas license plate "ROBOT" :
Here's our official picture at the DARPA website.
Sweet, so how much $$ is sitting on/in that thing right now?
"You can live your life in a thousand ways,
but it all comes down to that single day,
when you realize what you regret,
but you cant relaim and you cant forget."
----Trans Siberian Orchestra
Super VXer
And do you have closer pictures of the roof rack? I would love to know how you are securing things up there.
Fuzzy
2001 Proton #1413
Kaneohe, HI
'Zoid
Sorry for the late reply... I've uploaded a picture to the gallery, click here .
The picture shows how we mount sensors onto our robotic VX (Ironman Edition). We bolted a specially laminated sensor board, a.k.a. an old formica table-top :-) to the roof rack, then bolt the sensors to the formica tabletop... errrr sensor board. The blue "snorkel" is used to route wires from the sensors to the inside of the vehicle (the side window is replaced with a transparent acrylic panel and the snorkel is attached with a seal to the panel). The big sensor on the roof is a 200 pound rotating laser. It has 64 lasers that each capture over 4,000 points 360 degrees around the car, 20 times per second (a 5 milion point cloud per second). It was built by another team for last year's competition, we tested it. They are selling a much smaller and lighter version of it now as a product... price tag is $75K.
Although it would be a lot of work, we could actually restore the VX to its original condition. We had a couple of scrapes in last years qualifying event, you'd have to look closely to notice them.
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