Category Archives: PAVE Team

News, P12

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!

IGVC, News

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 Awards

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.
Downloads, IGVC, News

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:

Downloads, IGVC, News

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, News

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.

Our pit table at the IGVC

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.