Team Caltech – May 2005

Team Caltech is was formed in March 2003 to compete in the inaugural DARPA Grand Challenge.  Building upon the experience gained by competing in the 2004 race, Team Caltech has reorganized with a new plan and a new vehicle, and is poised to achieve victory in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Team Caltech is composed primarily of Caltech undergraduate students.  During the course of the 2004-2005 school year, team members are enrolled in CS/EE/ME 75, an Introduction to Multidisciplinary Systems Engineering.  Through this course, the basic structure and plan for Team Caltech began to take shape.  Taught by Richard Murray, this course provides an introduction to skills and tools that are essential in large scale, multifaceted projects.

Team Caltech is composed of three “race teams” and a number of other auxiliary teams.  Each race team is responsible for some broad set of functionality required on Alice for the race.  Each of the auxiliary teams is responsible for some auxiliary task that must be accomplished, but does not specifically relate to a device or module for use on Alice.  Each race team has a graduate student as a team coordinator, a professor as an advisor, and a number of undergraduate students that are responsible for the lions share of the work.

Vehicle/Embedded Systems Team
Coordinator: Sam Pfister
Advisor: Richard Murray

Planning Team
Coordinator: Lars Cremean
Advisor: Joel Burdick

Terrain Team
Coordinator: Kristo Kriechbaum
Advisor: Pietro Perona

PROGRESS

Spiral 0: From March 2004 to October 2004, Team Caltech was actively engaged in searching for the vehicle that would become Alice. The requirements were specific: she must be able to traverse rough terrain and high survivability at high speeds; she must be able to accommodate several passengers for rapid testing and development; she must be able to accommodate and power all the sensors, actuators, and computing systems that will allow her to navigate autonomously. Team Caltech settled on a 2005 Ford E-350 van to be customized by Sportsmobile. During the search for Alice, testing and development continued on Bob, Peggy, and Homer.

Spiral 1: From October 2004 to December 2004, testing continued on Bob while Alice was being modified and equipped for autonomous driving. Homer and Peggy were phased out and the students of Team Caltech focused on trajectory following and actuations systems. While the planning and terrain teams worked with Bob to develop and perfect the path following architecture, the Embedded Systems and Vehicle teams worked on Alice to perfect her computing, drive-by-wire, and power systems.

Spiral 2: From January 2005 to March 2005, testing began in earnest on Alice. Bob was phased out as a test vehicle and left in reserve should some tragedy befall Alice. Using the path following software developed for Bob as a base, the Planning Team tuned and tweaked the path follower to work effectively on Alice. During the Spring Field Test, Alice traversed nearly 50 miles of desert terrain at speeds up to 20 mph while following static paths. The Terrain Team produced its first working obstacle avoidance demonstrations at the Spring Field Test as well. The Embedded and Vehicle Teams used this term to hone the actuators and shake out vibration sensitive components

Spiral 3: During the period from March 2005 to June 2005, testing continued on path following and the Planning and Terrain Teams began to fuse their data into working maps of the surrounding terrain. By the DARPA Site Visit on May 11, 2005, Alice was able to effectively avoid obstacles at 10-15 mph and drive on paths devoid of obstacles at nearly 25 mph. Planned for the middle of June is an ambitious test that will see Alice navigate the entirety of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge race course.

Spiral 4: From June 2005 to October 2005, Team Caltech is spending a large amount of time in the California desert testing and debugging Alice in preparation for the race on October 8. Our proximity to the actual race course gives the team a convenient advantage, and Team Caltech intends to use this as effectively as possible. The test plan includes running hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles autonomously covering all the roads that the race can legally be run on. This intense test period will help give Team Caltech the edge to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Interested in volunteering to help Caltech students learn about engineering? Find out more...

Richard Murray, Faculty Sponsor

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Joel Burdick, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, Caltech
Richard Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems, Caltech
Pietro Perona, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Caltech

JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

Larry Matthies, Supervisor, Machine Vision Group, JPL
Kenny Meyer, JPL
Robert Rasmussen, JPL
And many others at JPL

NORTHROP-GRUMMAN ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS

Alex Fax, Member of Technical Staff
David van Gogh, Member of the Technical Staff

SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY INCORPORATED

Duane McRuer, Founder and Chairman, STI
Ole Balling, Staff Engineer, Research

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

Christopher Rasmussen, Assistant Professor, Department of CIS

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