PAVE was at the 2009 NYC FIRST Regional Competition from March 7 to March 8, 2009. This is the second year that we have been invited to exhibit at the competition’s career expo. This gave us a chance to show Prospect 12 and our build-in-progress robot for the 2009 IGVC to hundreds of middle- and high-school students from the greater New York City area. Team photo after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

The PAVE Vision team has begun gearing up for the 2009 IGVC. We will be continuing our stereo-vision approach to obstacle and lane detection, and this year we will be using a Videre Design STOC (Stereo On Chip) color stereo camera. This camera’s innovative design includes an onboard Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA that can stream live disparity maps to the PC. This frees up resources on our computer for depth map analysis and all the other processes that control the robot.

The image above shows a sample frame from the camera. The source image is at the bottom-left, and the disparity map calculated onboard the camera is shown at the bottom-right. The center window shows the 3D reconstruction of the scene, with the source image mapped onto the point cloud reconstructed from the disparity map.

As the semester progresses, the Vision team will provide updates on the modifications we are making to improve our obstacle and lane detection systems. We look forward to demonstrating our single-sensor approach again at the competition, and hope to make our system even more successful than last year.

As part of the “young filmmakers” program hosted this summer by the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Taofik Kolade ‘08 – MAE has put together a great video summarizing our experience at the IGVC competition. Enjoy!

We’ve been rather busy since the conclusion of the IGVC with traveling and unpacking; we apologize for the delay in posting this video from the final day of the competition. Hope you enjoy!

PAVE is very proud to announce that our participation in the 2008 IGVC competition has been extremely successful. We have won the following awards:
- 6th Place Autonomous Challenge (lane-following / obstacle avoidance)
- Completed JAUS Challenge (ability to communicate over the DoD’s standard message protocol for unmanned systems)
- 4th Place Navigation Challenge (GPS waypoint-following / obstacle avoidance)
- 1st Place Design Challenge (based on technical paper, oral presentation and robot inspection)
- Rookie of the Year
- 3rd Place overall (out of 47 teams)

A summary video will be posted shortly.

IGVC team members: Andrew Saxe ‘08, Chris Baldassano ‘09, Ben Chen ‘09, Gordon Franken ‘09, Will Hu ‘09, Jonathan Mayer ‘09, Tom Yeung ‘09, David Benjamin ‘10, Derrick Yu ‘10

A sidenote about the videos: We are aware that there has been some trouble accessing the summary videos we posted on youtube. This problem has been fixed – the videos should now load normally.