For the past few months we’ve been analyzing our performance as a team during the duration of the Urban Challenge. Through our participation in the Urban Challenge, we’ve learned valuable lessons in teamwork and leadership. Those lessons will be incorporated into our current research efforts.

During the fall of 2007, we recruited many new members who are now active participants on PAVE. They will be working with us as we continue our research efforts in autonomous vehicles. While the primary goal of PAVE will be to continue our work on Prospect 12, our Urban Challenge vehicle, a group of PAVE members will be competing in the 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, to be held between May 30 - June 2.

It was incredibly exciting for us to be in attendance at the NQE for the Urban Challenge and to watch the final race on November 3. We regret to announce that we were not accepted as a finalist for the Urban Challenge. The selection process was extremely rigorous: Though DARPA had announced their intent to accept 20 finalists (from amoung the 35 semi-finalists), only 11 teams moved on.

We would like to extend our congratulations to all the finalist teams, and especially to the six teams that finished the race: Cornell, Ben Franklin Racing, MIT, VictorTango, Stanford Racing and Tartan Racing.

PAVE would especially like to thank all of the individuals and organizations that have supported our group over the past year, including our sponsors, faculty and staff of the School of Engineering, parents and friends. Your support has enabled an exciting and instructional experience for all of the students involved and we are extremely grateful.

PAVE is currently in the process of evaluating our performance and planning future projects - stay tuned!

We’ve arrived at the site of the National Qualification Event in Victorville, CA. We look forward to opening ceremonies tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’re unpacking our vehicle, which has arrived safely after being trucked across the country. We’ll be posting updates from our Urban Challenge Blog. Once the NQE gets underway, DARPA will be hosting a webcast from the official DARPA Urban Challenge website.

PAVE is excited to announce that our friends from across the pond, Redgate Software are our latest sponsor. Redgate makes a variety of software tools for use with SQL and .NET, including the ANTS Profiler, which our team used back in 2005 to successfully fix the memory leak that prevented Prospect Eleven from traveling more than 9.5 miles in the Grand Challenge.

Redgate has provided us several licenses to their software and will be providing our team with shirts to wear at the competition.
If you or your company is interested in sponsoring our team, it’s not too late! Please contact us.

After working hard all summer, we have taken these past few weeks to finalize our approach and are now focusing on implementation and testing. Our vehicle will be getting an impressive paint job next week, and we are finalizing our sponsors list to print on our t-shirts and vehicle decals.

Be sure to check out the latest addition to our technical section, Lane Fusion.