This past weekend, PAVE presented Prospect Eleven at the annual P-Rade during Princeton reunions, leading the class of 1997 across campus in celebration of their 10th reunion.
Following reunions weekend were commencement ceremonies and PAVE would like to congratulate its members of the class of 2007, who recently completed their careers as Princeton undergraduates: Anand Atreya, Bryan Cattle, Safiyy Momen and Arthur Shum. We wish all of you the best!
More pictures are available on the P-Rade event page.
The confirmed date for our Site Visit has been set for July 9th, 2007.
For more information about this and other upcoming PAVE events, be sure to check out our events page.
We have posted another technical article detailing how we use Microsoft’s recently released Robotics Studio framework on our system.
Other upcoming events include a demonstration day on June 21st, and our participation in the annual P-Rade at Princeton Renunions on June 2nd.
In response to the recent announcement that PAVE has been selected as one of 53 teams to qualify for a site-visit evaluation by DARPA officials, we have received additional publicity. Be sure to check out the articles in this latest round of press coverage, including the Princeton homepage and Kevin Coughlin’s continuing coverage in The Newark Star-Ledger.
When the date for our site visit is confirmed, will will post it. Please contact us if you would be interested in attending.
In addition, we are still searching for a name for our competition vehicle. If you have any suggestions, or would be interested in sponsoring the naming of our vehicle, please let us know.
PAVE is proud to announce that we have been accepted by DARPA to have a site-visit evaluation. The site-visit is the next stage in the multi-step qualification process leading up to the final race on November 3, 2007. Teams that pass the site-visit will move on to the two-part National Qualifying Event (NQE), which will be held in late October, 2007. 52 other teams were also granted site-visits. The official DARPA press release is available here.
The site-visit will take place in mid- to late- June. We will release the actual date once it is confirmed. Our site-visit demonstration will be open to the public. Please contact us if you would be interested in attending.
As we continue to develop our technology for the Urban Challenge, our hardware systems are being finalized and we are focusing more on programming software intelligence. As systems are wrapped up, we will be posting summaries of our implementation here on the website. For now, check out the sensing and drive-by-wire systems articles under the Urban Challenge section. We will continue to add more to this section as we progress.
On tuesday afternoon, April 24, we were happy to welcome Mike Selzler to PAVE for a visit. Mike is the leader of team AutoTrek, in nearby Moorestown, NJ. He was kind enough to bring along their autonomous vehicle, which has been entered in both the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Challenges.
(l to r) Prospect Eleven, PAVE’s current vehicle and AutoTrek’s Ford Bronco
We took this opportunity discuss our respective approaches for the upcoming challenge. We also enjoyed how neat it was to have three autonomous vehicles in one place!
Mike Selzler (r) and some of the PAVE team, with our autonomous vehicles.
We have begun to enhance the technical section of our Urban Challenge approach. Check out our latest update on sensing. Stay tuned for further updates.
On Friday March 30, PAVE hosted a study break with the Princeton Student Chapter of IEEE outside of our garage. We demonstrated our “drive-by-gamepad” system to a crowd of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff.
We are also excited about the two recent publications on our team. We are proud to announce our first international coverage by LUSA, a Portuguese news syndicate. In addition, we were featured locally in The Princeton Packet.
For the past few weeks we have been preparing for our video submission to DARPA. We have been doing extensive testing and filming at Princeton’s Forrestal campus.
Our March 23rd Autonomous Vehicle Technology Demonstration was so sucessful, we have decided to host another one! We are inviting media organizations, all of our sponsors and the greater PAVE community to attend another technology demo on Friday, March 30.
Many thanks to Don Polec at ABC Action News 6, in Philadelphia, for running a segment about us on their nightly news:
Despite rain all during the afternoon of the 23rd, we presented our Ford Escape driving fully autonomously for the first time. This successful system integration readies us to continue development of our sensing and navigation systems. Our upcoming demo on the 30th will demonstrate autonomous navigation using a combination of GPS and our own visual lane-detection system.
Finally, we would like to announce that PAVE will be hosting a study break in conjunction with the IEEE-Princeton Chapter on Friday, March 30 at 4:30pm. Join us to learn more about our project and enjoy FREE hoagies, from Hoagie Haven.
Over the past few weeks we have been making excellent progress and we are beginning the hardware and software integration process that will allow our vehicle to perform all of the autonomous capabilities required for the April 13 Video Submission deadline.
We will be holding a demonstration of our autonomous systems on Friday, March 23. This event will be held at our testing facilities on the Forrestal Campus Annex of Princeton University. This event is open to the public, and we invite anyone who is interested to stop by. The invitation to this event can be found here.
On Friday, February 23rd, PAVE hosted a dedication ceremony to honor the recent donation of the 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid as our competition vehicle, as well as the completion of our new garage workspace. Attendees included students, faculty, staff, administration, sponsors and representatives from the local and regional media. A summary of the dedication ceremony is available though an internal press release.
On Saturday, February 24th, PAVE was a part of Princeton University’s Alumni Day program, with a presentation entitled “There’s Nobody Driving This Truck! Creation of an Autonomous Urban Vehicle: An Example of Extra-curricular Learning through Team-based Independent Research.” After the talk, attendees were invited outside for live tours and a demonstration of our new vehicle’s drive-by-wire capabilities.
