PAVE is pleased to announce the successful migration of our website to it’s new home on Princeton’s cPanel environment, after an extended leave of absence. We’re still working out some of the kinks in the new system, so please forgive any broken urls or unloaded images. In the meantime, check here for upcoming PAVE meetings and events!
Category Archives: Technical
New Vision for the IGVC
The PAVE Vision team has begun gearing up for the 2009 IGVC. We will be continuing our stereo-vision approach to obstacle and lane detection, and this year we will be using a Videre Design STOC (Stereo On Chip) color stereo camera. This camera’s innovative design includes an onboard Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA that can stream live disparity maps to the PC. This frees up resources on our computer for depth map analysis and all the other processes that control the robot.
The image above shows a sample frame from the camera. The source image is at the bottom-left, and the disparity map calculated onboard the camera is shown at the bottom-right. The center window shows the 3D reconstruction of the scene, with the source image mapped onto the point cloud reconstructed from the disparity map.
As the semester progresses, the Vision team will provide updates on the modifications we are making to improve our obstacle and lane detection systems. We look forward to demonstrating our single-sensor approach again at the competition, and hope to make our system even more successful than last year.
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.
Site Visit and Robotics Studio
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.
DARPA Video Submission
PAVE is pleased to announce that we have submitted our Video Demonstration to DARPA. We will find out on May 10th whether we have been accepted to the next phase of the competition – a site visit evaulation in June or July. Feel free to view our video here:
We have continued to receive press coverage. Check out some recent articles in The Princeton Packet as well as Princeton’s own E-Quad News Blog. We were also featured in a video clip, at TVJersey.com.
Bold Moves Forward
Since receiving our new competition vehicle several weeks ago, PAVE has made substantial progress in modifying it for autonomous operation. Utilizing many of the existing drive-by-wire systems in our 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid, we have so far been able to individually control the brakes, throttle and steering systems. Stay tuned for more progress reports, as we aim to have these systems integrated within a few weeks.
In addition, we have recently received some publicity. Check out this front page story from The Daily Princetonian, as well as a recent blog entry in E-Quad News.