Last Thursday, November 13, PAVE was invited to display Prospect Twelve at the fourth annual UsabilityNJ event for World Usability Day New Jersey 2008. Amongst electric vehicles, bio-fuel vehicles and a few Segways, we had the car on display, and a table setup in the main center with videos demonstrating Prospect Twelve – we were the only autonomous vehicle in attendance. Several lecturers presented in the evening portion of the event, on such topics as maritime policy, traffic improvements and infrastructure in the South Brunswick region, and the Usability contributions of NASA.
All posts by Seung Jae Lee
Upcoming Events
This month, PAVE will be featured at several events around New Jersey. Both events are open to the pubic with no charge for admission.
On November 13th, we will be at the fourth annual UsabilityNJ event for World Usability Day New Jersey 2008. The event is hosted at Rutgers, CAIP Center, CoRE building, Busch campus, Piscataway, NJ and runs from 4-9PM. The theme this year will be ‘Usability in Transportation’, and Prospect Twelve will be on display alongside several electric vehicles and Segways. Although we are not scheduled to present, PAVE will have a table at the event where we will be distributing information and showing videos of Prospect Twelve in action. For more information about the event or to obtain directions, please visit the UsabilityNJ website here.
On November 20th, PAVE will be presenting at the joint meeting of the Princeton chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers – Computer Society (IEEE-CS) at Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton. We will be giving a talk about our participation in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge and the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, as well as on our current and future research. A PDF with more details of the event is available here. We will also have Prospect Twelve with us at this event.
PAVE is excited to be a part of both of these events and we look forward to seeing you there!
Dusting Off the Cobwebs
We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks to update our website to reflect our current organization and projects. We’ve slightly updated the look of the site, and we’ve also updated the pages with content about our participation in the 2008 IGVC. We added a section for our Current Projects, which we will be continually updating with information about our current work on Prospect Twelve and our entry in the 2009 IGVC. Finally, on our Sponsors page, we’ve added a link to a pdf download of our sponsor packet, which you can also get here.
We are looking forward to making progress in the coming weeks on both our current projects, and we will be bringing you the updates as they happen.
New IGVC Video
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!
IGVC – Final Day Summary Video
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!
Princeton team finishes successful in 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition
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.
PAVE Wins IGVC Design Competition
We are extremely proud to announce that the Princeton team has won first place in the Design Competition of the 2008 IGVC. The Design Competition evaluated teams’ technical papers as well as an oral presentation and a robot inspection. We were selected as one of 6 finalists this morning, and gave a second oral presentation to a new set of judges in the afternoon. The winners were announced during an awards ceremony at 5pm. Congratulations to all of the Design Finalists: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, University of Detroit Mercy, Missouri University of Science and Technology, California State University Northridge, and École de technologie supérieure.
Today’s video summary:
IGVC – Day 3
Today was a very successful day. This morning we went through several practice runs on our presentation – we had a lot of material to present and only 10 minutes to do so. Our presentation was at 3pm, and we talked with four IGVC judges. They asked us a number of detailed questions on our implementation – it seemed as though they were very impressed with our robot. Please watch a video summary of today, including highlights from our presentation. The rest of the afternoon was spent debugging and fine tuning our systems in preparation for the Navigation and Autonomous challenges on Monday.
IGVC – Day 2 Summary Video
We’ve been spending a lot of time gearing up for our design presentation, which was this afternoon, so this video summary from Day 2 is coming a little late. We hope you are enjoying our daily progress updates. Please feel free to e-mail any questions or comments to us.
IGVC – Day 2
Today was the first day of the actual competition. We arrived this morning, unloaded the robot and set up our pit area. We passed the qualification run in the early afternoon, leaving us much time to test, debug and fine tune our software.
The IGVC consists of three main ‘challenges’. The Navigation Challenge tests robots’ ability to reach GPS waypoints while avoiding obstacles such as trash cans, traffic barriers and fences. The Autonomous Challenge tests robots’ ability to detect and follow lane markings painted in the grass, also while avoiding a variety of obstacles. Finally, the Design Challenge consists of a technical paper and an oral presentation. Our tech paper was submitted a few weeks ago, and our presentation is at 3pm on Saturday.
