All posts by Seung Jae Lee

Downloads, IGVC, News

IGVC – Day 1

We packed up our rented van with our luggage, tools, equipment and yes…our robot, Kratos. The 640 mile drive from Princeton to the competition site in Auburn Hills, MI took about 12 hours – we spent the night in eastern Ohio. After arriving in Michigan this morning, we checked-in to our hotel and were able squeeze in some last minute testing. Please watch today’s video summary:

Tomorrow (Friday) is the first day of the competition. Stay tuned for further updates on our experiences and progress.
-Rental van with Kratos secured-

IGVC, News

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competiton

For the past semester, a team of nine students on PAVE have been building a robot for the 2008 Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC). The IGVC will be held in Rochester, MI from May 30 to June 2.

The student’s robot, called Kratos, is 3 feet wide, 4 feet long, stands 5 feet tall and weights in at 210 lbs. It has an array of sensors including a GPS receiver, digital compass and color stereo camera. With these, it can navigate between waypoints on a field while safely avoiding obstacles such as trash cans, cones barricades and fences. Kratos is also capable of detecting and following lane markings painted in the grass or road. A copy of our technical paper will be available.

We will update the website with our progress during the IGVC … stay tuned.

Kratos, the robot

Special thanks to the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education and Ted Todd ’67 for supporting our efforts.

News, PAVE Team

Moving On

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.

News

Post Mortem

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!

Events, News, Urban Challenge

Blogging from the Urban Challenge

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.

News, Sponsorship

New Sponsor

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.

Group photo with redgate t-shirts

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.

News, Technical

Finalizing our approach

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.

News

Princeton makes it to the Semifinals!

Today, at the DARPATech conference, it was announced that the Princeton University Urban Challenge Team is one of 36 teams that have qualified for the National Qualification Event, October 26-31 in Victorville, CA. More information can be found in DARPA’s press release.

We would like to thank all our sponsors for the incredible support we’ve received. We couldn’t have made it this far without you all, and look forward to your continuing support of our efforts.

We still have a long way to go, so keep cheering!

Photos of our celebration:
Team Photo

Bryan Cattle + Korbel

Gas Tank

News

Site Visit Re-attempt

Since we were unable to fully demonstrate the abilities of our autonomous vehicle at our July 9 site visit, we spent the last two weeks debugging and stress testing our system. As a result, we were able to re-create the site visit and complete all four of the required missions. Videos of our ‘second site visit’ are available from the links below.

Video links:
Summary video (13.7 MB wmv)
Full video (102.8 MB wmv)

News, Urban Challenge

Site Visit – Summary

We had our site visit on this past Monday afternoon, July 9th, from 2 to 6 pm. Unfortunately, we did not perform as well as we expected. Various problems that had not been encountered during previous testing plagued us throughout the afternoon. As the hours wore on and the 90+ degree heat wore us out, we continued to battle these unforseen issues.

At the end of the day, we were able to complete about 50% of each of the runs. We successfully demonstrated most of the required behaviors, including staying in our lane, stopping at a stop line, passing a parked car and obeying mission parameters. For the times when our system worked properly, our performance was very consistent.

We will find out the final results of our site visit evaluation, which is also based on our Technical Paper, on August 10.

All of the Princeton University Urban Challenge Team members would like to extend hearty thanks to all of the family, friends and supporters who showed up to cheer us along at this big milestone in our project. In addition, PAVE gratefully acknowledges the FMC corporation for allowing us to use their facilities for our site visit.

Also, many thanks to the various media crews that have covered our conitnuing efforts in the Urban Challenge. Recent additions to our publicity page include Kevin Coughlin’s article in the Newark Star-Ledger, and news segments by Michelle Won of WZBN-TV and Patrick Regan of NJN News.