History

Founded in Spring, 2004, PAVE entered the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, with a silver pickup truck named “Prospect Eleven.” After successfully passing a site-visit evaluation and numerous runs at the semifinals event, Prospect Eleven was seeded 10th out of 23 entrants who were selected to compete in the final race. Ultimately, a memory leak caused the vehicle to shutdown after around 10 miles of autonomous travel.

After the conclusion of the Grand Challenge, the bug was fixed by changing one line of code. In November of 2005, the group returned to the desert and Prospect Eleven subsequently navigated the majority of the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenge Courses under autonomous control.

PAVE then focused on refining the systems in Prospect Eleven for reliability and added functionality as well as exploring additional research areas. PAVE elected to compete in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, with the goal to produce an autonomous vehicle that can complete the Challenge within the six hour time limit.

In January 2007, Ford Motor Company donated a 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid, which was modified for drive-by-wire operation and outfitted with computers and an array of cameras for sensing. Over the ensuing 10 months, PAVE designed, implemented and tested a complex autonomous system, passing a 5-minute video demonstration, Technical Paper submission and Site Visit evaluation in the process. We were invited to the NQE as one of 35 semifinalists.

Ultimately, the Princeton University team did not make it to the finals of the Urban Challenge. 11 teams were accepted, and 6 finished the course, with top prizes going to Tartan Racing (Carnegie Mellon University), Stanford Racing (Stanford University) and VictorTango (Virginia Tech).